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I 



^ht Mtvntk Utttuttsi for 19X1-12, ^tUhexth at 
Ige 0tio Wtalt^an Winiinvait^, ^ptil 21^26, 1912 



The Increase of Faith 

Some Present-Day Aids to Belief 



BY 
FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL 

Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and Ex-President 
of DePauw University 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 






Copyright, 1912, by 
FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 



'CI,A328906 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Merrick Lectures 5 

Introduction 7 

I. The Scientific Spirit 9 

II. The Philosophic Outlook 48 

III. SocTAii Movements 89 

IV. The Ethical Advance 128 

V. The Adornment of Doctrine 169 

VI. The Demand for Christ 204 



THE MERRICK LECTURES 

By the gift of the late Frederick Merrick, 
M.D., D.D., LL.D., for fifty-one years a taem- 
ber of the Faculty, and for thirteen of those 
years President of Ohio Wesleyan University, 
a fund was established proyiding an annual 
income for the purpose of securing lectures 
within the general field of Experimental and 
Practical Religion. The following courses 
have previously been given on this foundation : 

Daniel Curry, D.D. — Christian Education. 

President James McCosh, D.D., LL.D. — 
Tests of the Various Kinds of Truth. 

Bishop Randolph S. Foster, D.D., LL.D.— 
The Philosophy of Christian Experience. 

Professor James Stalker, D.D. — The 
Preacher and His Models. 

John W. Butler, D.D. — Mission Work in 
Mexico. 

Professor George Adam Smith, D.D., LL.D. 
— Christ in the Old Testament. 

Bishop James W. Bashford, Ph.D., D.D., 

LL.D. — The Science of Religion. 

5 



THE MERRICK LECTURES 

James M. Buckler, D.D., LL.D.— The Natu- 
ral and Spiritual Orders and Their Relations. 

John R. Mott, M.A., F.R.G.S., LL.D.— The 
Pastor and Modern Missions. 

Bishop Elijah E. Hoss, D.D., LL.D.; Pro- 
fessor Doremus A. Haves, Ph.D., S.T.D., 
LL.D.; Charles E. Jefferson, D.D., LL.D.; 
Bishop William F. McDowell, D.D., LL.D.; 
Bishop Edwin H. Hughes, D.D. — The Xew 
Age and Its Creed. 

Robert E. Speer, M.A.— The Marks of a 
Man; or. The Essentials of Christian Charac- 
ter. 

The Rev. Charles Stelzle, Miss Jane Ad- 
dams, Commissioner of Labor Charles P. 
Neill, Ph.D., Professor Graham Taylor, and 
the Rev. George P. Eckman, D.D.— The So- 
cial Application of Religion. 

The Rev. George Jackson, M.A. — Some Old 
Testament Problems. 

Professor Walter Rauschenbusch, D.D. — 
Christianizing the Social Order. 



INTRODUCTION 

The lectures which make up this volume 
constitute a distinct addition to the litera- 
ture of the Merrick Lecture Course. They 
embody a conception of religion and of life 
which is greatly worth while. 

The thesis which Bishop McConnell has 
set forth in his earlier works on "The Diviner 
Immanence/^ and "Religious Certainty'^ re- 
appears here in new and charming form. 
With his penetrative mind he has bored into 
a great central and ruling principle, which 
dictates his message to our day. While his 
thought is so comprehensive that it cannot be 
caught in a phrase, this governing principle 
may roughly be described as this — religion 
the full and glad response of a complete hu- 
manity to a Christian Deity. In its applica- 
tion this principle, of course, touches the 
whole manhood in all its potentialities, intel- 
lectual and moral, aesthetic and social. It 
deals with all phases of life and thought and 
presents a vision of good times, great men, 

7 



INTRODUCTION 

and a conquering God. It affords a sure basis 
for faith, and sets aspiration free. 

The thought is vitalizing, and should bring 
to other religious teachers and learners (as it 
has already brought to many) something of 
the calm power which marks the author him- 
self. Herbert Welch. 

Delaware, Ohio. 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

Before we begin a discussion of the various 
factors in present-day life which make for the 
increase of faith it may be well for us to ask 
the question, What is faith? 

Many answers are at hand. The upholder 
of creed declares that faith is assent to the 
articles of belief. Yet assent must be more 
than intellectual. Sometimes the fundamen- 
tal propositions of Christianity are stated as 
if they were mathematical axioms. Assent to 
mathematical axioms does not require any 
moral virtue. The devils might well assent 
to intellectual propositions. Another defini- 
tion would turn around the thought that faith 
is the enjoyment of an inner experience. This 
definition is good except for the danger of 
suggesting that the experience is so wholly a 
matter of feeling that it has no room what- 
soever for faith in the sense of trust. Still 
another would have us believe that faith is a 
keeping of Commandments, which also is good 

9 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

if Commandments are not conceived of in a 
mechanical or artificial fashion. 

All that is true in these definitions can be 
preserved, and all that is harmful avoided, if 
we say that Christian faith is Christian life. 
Every activity of the Christian bases itself 
upon trust — trust in the Christian idea of 
God, trust in the Christian idea of man, trust 
in the possibility of interaction between God 
and man. Out of such trust the life unfolds 
in certain practical activities, which lead to 
certain insights, which culminate in a general 
feeling of spiritual satisfaction. At the cen- 
ter of all is the will to do the will of God, 
and out of this comes knowledge which is 
more than merely intellectual, and experience 
which is more than the flow of superficially 
emotional states. It is the purpose of these 
lectures to show that various great factors in 
modern times are w^orking to aid, at least in 
a general way, the progress of Christian faith. 

The first factor we are to discuss is the 
scientific spirit of our day. It is part of 
present-day good fortune that we have passed 
beyond the era of so-called conflicts between 
science and religion. We can easily see how 
these conflicts arose. The latter part of the 
nineteenth century was a period of unparal- 

10 



I 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

leled scientific advance. The advance was so 
real and so unlike anything that the world 
had ever before known that science came 
quickly to an immense prestige. The glory of 
the actual discoveries, the charm of the evolu- 
tionary hypothesis, the practical benefits to 
be realized at once from scientific conquest, 
drew more minds to the consideration of 
scientific problems than had ever been drawn 
before in a similar period of time. Just think 
for a moment of the increase of the number of 
students of the sciences since the date of the 
announcement of the theory of natural selec- 
tion, of the increase too of the means of scien- 
tific advance. With science practically tri- 
umphant in sphere after sphere, and with 
students turning toward science by hundreds, 
it is not to be wondered at that the first inter- 
pretations of the new heavens and the new 
earth were in the direction of atheism. With 
matter apparently doing so much on its own 
account, it was put in the chief place with 
confident expectation on the part of the new 
science that matter would soon explain every- 
thing. One who was a student in a biological 
laboratory in those days has told us that he 
had in his laboratory what might be called a 
veritable experience of materialism. He 

11 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

watched through the microscope certain bac- 
teriological developments. Suddenly the im- 
pression seized him that this was all — that 
the philosophers and poets and prophets were 
wrong, and that spirit was nothing. The ex- 
perience was as definite as a religious con- 
version. To instance such an experience is to 
suggest how far we have gone from the credu- 
lous, uncritical scientific procedure of those 
early days. 

Some of the conflicts of those days came 
out of the overpowering of the imagination 
by the long flights of time which the scientists, 
and especially the evolutionists, felt to be 
necessary for their theories. True, the length 
of eternity used to be a favorite theme with 
old-time preachers, whether to frighten sin- 
ners or to comfort saints. But the moment 
the geologist and the biologist began to speak 
of processes running through millions of years 
the effect seemed appalling to religious 
thought. The reason now seems to have been 
not so much the conflict with the biblical reve- 
lation as the crude question as to where God 
was during the periods. The thought that 
God was in the periods did not find ready ac- 
ceptance. After a while, though, thoughtful 
men began to see that the crisis brought on 

12 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

by the evolutionary hypothesis was by no 
means the most serious through which Chris- 
tian belief had passed. Far more serious had 
been the announcement and the acceptance of 
the Copernican system. The acceptance of 
the idea that the world is round was at one 
time a deadly heresy. That diagram on the 
first page of the school geographies to illus- 
trate the sphericity of the earth, the ship ap- 
pearing on the horizon with her masts first 
visible to the observer on shore — this is the 
costliest diagram in existence, judging by the 
suffering required to make men accept the 
truth it conveyed. But men not only ac- 
cepted the idea of the earth as a globe, but they 
accepted also the vast distances which the Co- 
pernican system called for and found these 
not incompatible with Christian faith. The 
late Goldwin Smith used to urge somewhat 
peevishly that dogmatic theology should have 
died with the announcement of the Coper- 
nican theories, that it would die sooner or 
later because its head had been crushed by 
that announcement. Still theologies of one 
sort or another live on. If they are to die, it 
will take something more than Copernicanism 
or Darwinism to kill them, for Christianity 
can adjust itself easily both to practically in- 

13 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

finite stretches of space and practically infi- 
nite stretches of time. Thinkers of all schools 
have virtually agreed upon this. 

Moreover, conflicts between science and re- 
ligion have in our day been seen not to be 
conflicts between science and religion so much 
as between scientists and scientists and be- 
tween different schools of religion. It would 
be very easy to make quite a showing of con- 
flict between science and religion by picking 
out all the progressive utterances of scien- 
tists and by putting them over against a mass 
of utterances of belated theologians. But if 
we were to take the utterances of scientists as 
a whole and the utterances of theologians as a 
whole, we should quite likely flnd that there 
have been progressive scientists and progres- 
sive theologians, conservative scientists and 
conservative theologians. Quite as bitter in- 
vective has been heaped upon progressive 
scientists by reactionary scientists as upon 
progressive scientists by conservative theo- 
logians. The battle is really between the 
spirit of progress and the spirit of conser- 
vatism. When a doctrine, whether scientific 
or theological, has organized itself into a 
system, it partakes of the over-conservatism 
which is a part of the original sin of institu- 

14 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

tions. The Church is not the only institu- 
tion which suffers from conservatism. It is 
not fair, taking the whole Church into the 
account, to say that the Church suffers more 
from conservatism than do the political or in- 
dustrial or educational or social institutions. 
Our modern knowledge of institutions will 
hardly permit us to speak very seriously of 
conflicts between science and religion. The 
conflict is really the age-old, world-wide con- 
test between the spirit of progress and the 
spirit of conservatism. 

And, again, certain victories by scientific 
thinkers over some arguments for Christianity 
have not been victories over Christianity, but 
over these particular arguments. For ex- 
ample, much has been made of the practical 
surrender by theists to-day of the old-fashioned 
design argument which had been thought po- 
tent since the days of Paley. The more de- 
termined of the earlier apologists would pick 
out some fact, preferably from the organic 
realm, and would show that the evidence of 
design in the fact pointed to the existence of 
a Creator working with a plan in mind. We 
cannot help feeling that these old-fashioned 
arguments still have a value that modern 
thinkers seem unwilling to concede to them, 

15 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

but there is a sort of offensive coeksureness 
about them, and they often start more ques- 
tions than they answer. When an ambitious 
reasoner of this type declares that he can 
prove the existence of God from the design 
shown in a mosquito's wing, the question in- 
evitably arises as to why the mosquito should 
exist at all — ^rs^hich suggests the difficulty 
which arises through picking out some one 
fact and looking at it alone. In our day we 
feel that design must apply to the system as 
a whole. We seek for signs of plan not so 
much in details as in the entire sweep and 
outcome of the vast cosmic process. This 
type of thinking has its pitfalls as truly as the 
other, but it is in the fashion just at present. 
In any case, we can see how little the mere 
change of emphasis in our argument can 
really affect the foundations of faith. 

To come closer to the heart of our ques- 
tion, however, we must ask not only whether 
this or that body of organized scientific re- 
sults makes against faith, but whether the 
scientific temper or scientific spirit makes 
against faith. Through the positive scientific 
advances of the past fifty years, through the 
discussion of these even in the newspapers, 
through the familiarization of the public with 

16 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

scientific processes, there has come and does 
come increasingly into our own life a scien- 
tific spirit which we can recognize even though 
we may not be able to define it. For the pur- 
poses of this discussion a formal definition is 
not necessary. 

Our first main proposition is that there is 
nothing in the scientific spirit prohibitive of 
theistic or Christian belief. We shall have 
something to say later of the decline of the 
dogmatic spirit in theology. We must say 
here that, remarkable as has been the decline 
of the dogmatic spirit in theology, the de- 
cline of the dogmatic spirit among those who 
are looked upon as the real leaders of science 
is more remarkable still. In the later seven- 
ties and early eighties it was not so. Scien- 
tists then had a great deal to say about what 
could not be. Grant that the scientist to-day 
may so often say, ^^I do not know,^^ that he 
may get himself into a chronic state of agnos- 
ticism, still this scientific agnosticism is better 
than the scientific dogmatism which denies 
outright the value of religious belief. 

Among the real achievements of science in 
recent decades none is of more real value 
than the recognition of the limitations of 
science by every man of real scientific spirit. 

17 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

In fact, there is question as to whether a 
student can lay claim to the scientific spirit if 
he is not willing to recognize the limitations 
of scientific procedure. There is nothing more 
unscientific than to strive to build up a scien- 
tific orthodoxy which arrogates to itself the 
right to pass judgment in all fields. In a 
general way even popular thinking to-day 
recognizes the truth that it is the function of 
science to describe processes and the function 
of philosophy and religion to give them their 
final interpretation. What we call ultimate 
problems lie out beyond the reach of technical 
scientific processes. Suppose the discoveries 
of science to do away with matter as we think 
of it. Suppose we accept the modern scien- 
tific view that matter is, after all, but a mani- 
festation of Force or forces. What this Force 
or these forces are, whether personal or im- 
personal, and what the fundamental purpose 
of the Force is if it is personal, is not a prob- 
lem on which the scientist is finally the au- 
thority. 

But science not only has certain limitations 
in the nature of the case. It also has limita- 
tions growing out of its own imperfections. 
Its instruments are not yet fine enough to 
make it the real authority in some realms. 

18 



n 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

Take the problem of human immortality. 
Many scientists have dogmatically affirmed 
that the life of a soul after death is impos- 
sible. But how can a scientist of real scien- 
tific spirit pronounce thus dogmatically? The 
scientist would probably answer that con- 
scious life is the accompaniment of certain 
forms of nerve structure, that the material 
conditions on this earth are the only condi- 
tions which make such delicate structures 
possible, that with the destruction of the tissue 
there is no reason to think that the life makes 
any other material adjustment. All of this, 
however, is assumption. No necessary con- 
nection has ever been shown between nerve 
structure as we know it and conscious activity. 
On the one side is nerve and on the other is 
consciousness, but there is just as much of a 
chasm between consciousness and nerve as 
there is between consciousness and stone, ex- 
cept that, as a matter of fact, certain forms of 
consciousness and nerve structure are found 
together. For the dogmatic scientist this fact 
of being found together will be enough, but 
the more reflective scientist will not be so 
sure. This latter observer has learned to dis- 
trust the mere fact of mutual accompaniment 
as of final significance. We cannot always 

19 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

judge consciousness by the company it keeps. 
If we lived in a world of just one language, 
the dogmatist might readily conclude that 
there is a necessary and inevitable connection 
between the characters l-o-v-e and the senti- 
ment which we know that these characters put 
together as a word express. We are held back 
from this dogmatic absurdity, however, by the 
fact that there are many languages, and that 
while a sentiment may be the same it may be 
expressed in writing by any one of many dif- 
ferent arbitrary symbols. The connection be- 
tween consciousness and matter, as we know 
it, may likewise be just one of many possible 
adjustments, or it is conceivable that con- 
sciousness may get along without any material 
accompaniment whatever. Our universe may 
be penetrated and interpenetrated by other 
universes which the instruments of our uni- 
verse may not be able to detect. In other 
words, a scientific spirit that understands it- 
self can say nothing prohibitive of a belief in 
immortality. 

Nor can science say anything prohibitive of 
a belief in freedom. The scientist may object 
that the reign of law prohibits the belief in 
freedom. Every deed that occurs must be 
caught up into the web of law, to be sure, but 

20 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

there are laws and laws, and there is nothing 
which a truly scientific spirit can find irra- 
tional in the thought of a choice between dif- 
ferent laws. If virtue is chosen, the path will 
be upward toward heroism or saintliness. If 
vice is chosen, the path will be downward 
toward sluggishness and degradation. But 
the struggle uphill and the rush down are both 
in accordance with laws. There is no way of 
escape from law, but we can escape some laws. 
Of course a man may break out that it is im- 
possible to show scientifically that we are not 
puppets jerked by unseen wires. But it is 
equally impossible to prove that we are. Sci- 
ence leaves the door open to belief in freedom. 
We have already said that proof of the non- 
existence of God is scientifically out of the 
question. The scientist comes down at last to 
forces as they manifest themselves in the 
world of space and time. He is not, indeed, 
able to say from a study of the forces them- 
selves that there is a God back of them, but 
he is even less able to say that there is not. 
Indeed, it is really easier to say that there is 
than that there is not — easier to declare for a 
God whose presence would account for the 
play and interplay of the forces than to stop 
with the forces themselves. 

21 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

From the proposition that the scientific 
spirit is not prohibitive of belief we advance 
to the proposition that the scientific spirit is 
largely friendly to belief. We admit at the 
outset that we do not hope to establish this 
proposition by any supposed revelations from 
any particular facts. The aid is largely in- 
direct, but really all the more potent on that 
account. 

We call attention to the fact that scientific 
inquiry is more and more human in its pur- 
pose and outcome. That is to say, the aim is 
to fit the facts of the universe more and more 
to the needs of the bodies and minds of men. 
In a later paragraph we shall give emphasis 
to the need of knowledge for the sake of knowl- 
edge itself, which is much the same as saying 
knowledge for the sake of the minds of men. 
Here we say that a large part of scientific ad- 
vance has come from a desire to relieve the 
pressing physical needs of men. No matter 
how much we admire the pursuit of knowl- 
edge for its own sake, we make mental reser- 
vations after all. We grow impatient with 
the search for facts which clearly have no 
human reference. We may sneer at the prac- 
tical aim in the pursuit of knowledge, but we 
qualify our scorn by reference to the lower 

22 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

order of practical. We do not wish a scien- 
tist to work with so practical an aim as money- 
making, but if his work is bacteriological in- 
vestigation, for example, we do not object to 
his being practical enough to search for and 
trace out the life history of a deadly disease 
germ whose annihilation means the deliver- 
ance of the race from a plague rather than to 
track down a harmless germ whose life and 
death are devoid of significance to human be- 
ings. If we are to commend scientists for 
their devotion to science, we are a little more 
likely to choose as hero the man who died ex- 
perimenting with means of fighting yellow 
fever than the man who wore himself out de- 
ciphering prehistoric inscriptions. 

Apart altogether from our scientific ideals 
on this point, great advances to-day are being 
made by those who bring the human purpose 
into their researches. And in the past the 
aid of science toward the growth of faith has 
been along the line of making conditions of 
human life really human. Full and rich hu- 
man insight is bound to result as science 
makes the burdens of life less heavy. Science, 
of course, makes possible a materialistic view 
of the universe. But there is another mate- 
rialism — that of sluggish and inert half-alive- 

23 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

ness, where the body is forced into chief con- 
sideration by the burdens placed upon it. 
With the removal of these burdens some men 
begin to think in wrong channels indeed, but 
better have them do this than not think at all. 
The flourishing of materialism in times of 
scientific advance is a flourishing of thought 
that in times before science came to the aid of 
man was not thought at all, but a dull heavy 
sense of pain. 

A recent traveler in China has told of the 
life of the chair-bearer, even when the bearer 
has employment which pays him as much as 
he asks — the heavy load, the dull monotony of 
the journey, the thin garments which afford 
no protection against the rain, the utter weari- 
ness when the day closes, the wretched relief 
of the opium pipe. Here is a picture of a 
comparatively fortunate laborer in a land 
where science has not yet been permitted to 
lend its aid for the relief of human misery. 
In such lands the higher faculties have practi- 
cally no chance. Beliefs do indeed grow in 
such lands, but they but accentuate the misery 
of the people. They are but reflections of the 
low vitality of the nation. Now, when it 
comes to estimate the value of science for be- 
lief we must not forget this indirect service of 

24 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

aid to the conditions out of which belief 
comes. The shortening of the hours and the 
lightening of the burden of labor, the relief of 
communities from dread of widespread hor- 
rors like conflagrations and plagues, the pro- 
vision for leisure on the part of larger masses 
of men — all this is a help to belief. 

In all of this we do not forget the danger 
of the control over material things which 
comes with the advance of science. Prosperity 
is often harder to endure than adversity. The 
psalmist said of old that the people who had 
no changes forgot God. We know the power 
of adversity to lead men to prayer, and we 
know how widespread distresses will lead to 
revivals of religion. We know too that when 
men lose hope in earth they turn toward 
heaven; but our contention holds good that 
unless we have the material conditions for a 
human life we cannot have a really human 
life, and that unless we have really human life 
belief which, on the whole, comes out of life 
at its brightest and best, is not apt greatly to 
flourish. We can readily see that a scientific 
control of the earth might be too lavishly com- 
plete for men at their present state of moral 
development, but there must be some control. 
A man can hardly think rightly about God if 

25 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

he has no leisure to think at all. No religious 
advance worth mentioning came, outside the 
pastoral and desert peoples who had long op- 
portunities for brooding, until society got 
enough goods ahead to secure to religious 
leaders at least a measure of freedom from 
manual burdens. When science makes it pos- 
sible for the masses to have large leisure, multi- 
tudes may, indeed, waste their leisure in idle- 
ness or worse, but multitudes of others will 
lay hold on higher beliefs than they have ever 
known. Many of our beliefs to-day still carry 
with them much of the hardness of a bitter 
time. The idea of God as a taskmaster, the 
emphasis on the virtue of chastening, the sense 
of tragedy in much religion — all this is a repe- 
tition of days that were poor and bitter. The 
highest type of saintliness is not that which 
can get along without material things, but 
that which can control and rightly use ma- 
terial things. Sweet indeed are the uses of 
adversity, but the uses of prosperity are 
sweeter still. The meek are to inherit the 
earth and the saints are to judge the world. 
Modern science is to help the meek to their 
throne and the saints to their judgment seat. 
If the meek can remain meek when they come 
to their inheritance, and the saints can re- 

26 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

main saintly while seated on a throne of judg- 
ment, the triumph of grace will be complete, 
and out of the triumph of grace will come a 
vision of the truth which will be complete. 
In a large sense science prepares the way for 
faith. 

We return now for a moment to the con- 
ception of science as a system of knowledge 
on its own account. Not only has science 
made a way for faith in its utilization and 
control of material forces, but the habits of 
mind, the intellectual temper and outlook, 
which are part of the scientific spirit, have 
been an aid to faith. The scientists have 
moved through the fields of belief with keen 
blades cutting down the weeds. In any realm 
which has to do with religious belief it is very 
easy for the mind to run off into superstition ; 
and while superstition comes often out of the 
religious side of our nature, superstition is the 
foe of religion. William James used to say 
that the best way to deal with superstitions 
is to ventilate them, to break them open 
and let the northwest wind of science roar 
through them. So the northwest wind of 
science has actually blown away ghosts and 
goblins and witches and demons which used 
to infest the realm of religious thinking. 

27 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

Understand now, this has not been achieved 
by the discovery of this or that scientific fact. 
Quite an argument might be made out for all 
these ghost folk, but the scientific temper 
brushes the argument aside. Let us not for- 
get this when we are tempted to cry out 
against the scientific spirit as a despoiler in 
the realm of religious feeling. Undoubtedly 
that spirit may be a despoiler. We have only 
to notice some of the wild things done in edu- 
cational realms to see what can happen if an 
overzealous scientific spirit gets out of its own 
realm — the dissection of a great literary 
classic, for example, from the standpoint of 
minute philological technicalities which miss 
the spirit of the author. But while the atmos- 
phere of the laboratory may sometimes prove 
poisonous in the library or the studio or the 
cloister, still that atmosphere is more deadly 
to hobgoblins than it is to angels. Unless we 
have large familiarity with the thought of 
earlier ages we cannot imagine how fortunate 
we are in being free from blighting supersti- 
tion in religion. 

Moreover, there are other types of supersti- 
tion which the scientific spirit does much to 
banish. Men accept inaccurate and inade- 
quate generalizations which get themselves ex- 

28 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

pressed in wise saws and which are then al- 
most w^orshiped as a part of a sort of ortho- 
doxy. To take one or two simple illustrations 
of no particular moral application, think of 
the old-fashioned fear of night air, especially 
in sick-rooms. Or, in another realm, that 
old saw, "Slow but sure.'^ When it occurs to 
some statistical investigator to examine thou- 
sands of cases of "slow'^ people he finds that 
they are not at all likely to be sure, nor does 
he find that the "sure" persons are likely to 
be slow. In religious thinking we have ac- 
cepted misunderstandings of the laws of he- 
redity, mighty as those laws are, until they 
have become veritable superstitions. Simi- 
larly with notions about depravity, or about 
the possibility of saying that men and things 
are either in one religious class or another. 
This "either-or" superstition is very preva- 
lent. When men set themselves to look at the 
actual facts of this world in a scientific spirit 
they find both men and things to be pretty 
much "both-and'' — pretty well mixed and 
tangled and complicated; so that hasty gen- 
eralizations, even if they have the dignity of 
long tradition behind them and enjoy the 
attractiveness of epigrammatic form, may be 
nothing but superstitions after all. The 

29 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

matter-of-factness of the scientific spirit is 
sometimes too matter-of-fact, but, after all, 
we live in a world of matters-of-fact. So long 
as we live in this sort of world it is well to 
approach matters-of-fact in a matter-of-fact 
spirit. A large part of the religious life is of 
this matter-of-fact nature. Science aids us 
here in a right approach. 

Of still further value for the increase of 
faith has been the scientific emphasis upon 
system and law. The late Francis A. Walker 
used to speak of certain psychological by- 
products of modern commercial institutions 
as of nearly equal value with the direct out- 
put of the institutions. He used to speak of 
a bank as a manufactory of punctuality, of 
great importance to multitudes of men in 
holding before them unescapable obligations 
which must be met at particular times. The 
bank does away with the old loose verbal 
agreement to be fulfilled any time more or 
less near another time, and also makes even 
the written instrument more binding. This 
educational effect is of immense value to the 
community. Now, it would simply be impos- 
sible to estimate the influence for good of the 
ideas of system and law as these are enforced 
by modern science. We all know the damag- 

30 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIl^ 

ing effect which is wrought by the conception 
of law when that binds down the mind by iron 
regulations. We know how easily the system 
may become hostile to religion, but it is of 
vast value to have the ideas of law and system 
held before the minds of men. Modern science 
is not the only force which has worked in this 
direction, and the later scientific emphasis is 
not more marked than the emphasis of the 
early scientists; but in our time the sheer 
abundance of the emphasis has become a com- 
pelling factor. Law has been familiar to men 
from the dawn of civilization, and there were 
worthy scientists in the earliest days, but the 
stress on law and system has never before 
been made so much a part of the common con- 
sciousness as now. On the whole, this is for 
good. It introduces system and regularity 
into belief. If belief is to be worth while, it 
must be sane, and the emphasis on the great 
regularities makes for sanity. In these ad- 
dresses it must be remembered that by the in- 
crease of faith we mean the increase of faith 
which is really worth while, not the rank 
abundance of all sorts and conditions of be- 
liefs. 

All this, however, is somewhat indirect. 
Science has been of direct aid to faith in plac- 

31 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

ing in the hands of faith the scientific method 
which can be used mightily in religious effort. 
Just as religion uses the material instruments 
of modern civilization as an aid in building 
her church edifices, just as she uses the instru- 
ments of medicine and surgery to carry on her 
works of relief, just as she uses printing 
presses and express trains to send the gospel 
over the world, just so she uses the instru- 
ments of the scientific method to approach 
anew the facts which are the center of the 
Christian system. Truly scientific method, 
as illustrated in the hands of the great mas- 
ters, is a wonderful tool, even more wonderful 
than any material tool which has come of 
scientific study. The patience which can ex- 
amine huge heaps of details and sort them 
into order, the self-control which can suspend 
judgment until an adequate conclusion ap- 
pears, the discernment which can sift out es- 
sentials from nonessentials, the intuition 
which can finally seize and state a law — this, 
which in part describes the scientific method 
of our day, is a valuable instrument in the aid 
of faith. To refer again to a fact mentioned a 
moment ago, the Church appropriates more 
and more the appliances of modern physical 
and industrial and social relief for the bring- 

32 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

ing in of the kingdom of God. She shows an 
increasing willingness to listen to scientific 
scrutiny of her own claims and her own faults. 
She is willing more and more, if we are to 
judge by the utterances of many of her leaders, 
to surrender claims of artificial authority of 
one sort or another if she can have the power 
that comes from righteous influence. 

Again, the Church shows more and more 
willingness to allow the Scriptures to be sub- 
jected to the test of the scrutiny of the scien- 
tific method, or, rather, she seems more and 
more willing to accept the results of such 
study. We trust that we do not err from the 
way of strict truth when we voice our opinion 
that whatever harm has come through the 
scientific handling of the Scriptures has come, 
not from those who have been too scientific, 
but, rather, from those who have not been 
enough scientific. Dogmatism is not scien- 
tific. Too often the approach of the theologian 
toward the Bible has been with the announced 
predetermination that certain teachings must 
be found there. Too often the approach of the 
scientific critic has been with the predetermi- 
nation that these teachings must not be found 
there. Of course all thinking must have its 
assumptions and presuppositions, but it is not 

33 



THE IIsCREASE OF FAITH 

the part of the scientific spirit to blind the 
eyes to facts for the sake of the presupposi- 
tions. 

At the hands of men of true scientific spirit 
the Scriptures have been made new in our day 
with effects like that which must have at- 
tended their translation out of dead language 
into living language. The fact that the Scrip- 
tures were written in a prescientific age does 
not prevent our getting great good from look- 
ing at them through the scientific atmosphere. 
Thus viewed they have become new. Parts of 
Scripture once enigmatic have become clear; 
parts misplaced have found their true setting, 
and the foundations have been laid on a firmer 
basis. Even very radical New Testament 
study has found a basis for claim that some 
portions of New Testament writing go back 
much further toward the times of Christ than 
we had previously supposed, and radical study 
in its attempt to separate the Jesus of history 
from the Christ of faith has failed to come 
upon a time when the Christian writers did 
not view Christ essentially as we view him to- 
day. Looking at the facts of religious history 
as facts their significance becomes more and 
more important. The fact of the Scriptures 
and their influence, the fact of Christ and his 

34 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

power, the fact of prayer and its effects for 
good, whether we call these effects reflex or 
not — all these come to new thrones when we 
approach them in the scientific spirit. 

We have said that in the scientific spirit of 
our time there is nothing hostile to a proper 
religious spirit and that in many ways there 
is aid to religion in the scientific spirit. It 
remains for us to say that even where the facts 
of the world seem darkest for the spirit of 
faith the scientific spirit furnishes a challenge 
and an incentive to the religions spirit. For the 
scientific spirit is also a spirit of faith. Science 
proceeds upon the most daring assumptions. 
We may not call the faiths of science faiths : 
we call them hypotheses; but hypothesis is a 
form of faith. If we were to write an eleventh 
chapter of Hebrews for men of science, it 
would have to be a chronicle of the mighty 
deeds made possible through the spirit of faith. 
The scientist does not win his victories by 
going into a laboratory and by staring. He 
is animated by a mighty belief, and in that 
belief seeks for light. Columbus sailed west in 
obedience to a theory, and his quest was one of 
faith. There is a splendid daring about such 
faith to-day. Whether it be in the assumption 
that by invention we can navigate the air, or 

35 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

in the assumption that we can drive tubercu- 
losis out of the world, or in the assumption 
that we can find out whether there are Mar- 
tians or not, the daring is the daring of faith. 
There is a faith of science, even more truly 
than there is a science of faith. 

It will be observed that we have nowhere 
picked out any facts which specifically make 
for belief. We have been speaking of the scien- 
tific spirit and the scientific temper. We now 
admit the existence of many facts which at 
first seem irreconcilable with belief. We in- 
sist, however, that the approach of religion to 
these facts should be with the same daring as 
that with which the scientific spirit approaches 
them. For example, it is said that the very 
size of the universe is against the spirit of 
faith, that it may have been well enough to 
believe in the fundamentals of Christianity 
back in the days when this earth was con- 
ceived of as the center of the physical system. 
To-day science has shown that the earth is so 
small as to be of little account in a solar 
system in which it is a mere fragment. It 
was all well enough to believe in Christianity 
at a time when men did not think that man 
had been on the earth more than a few thou- 
sand years. But since Copernicanism and 

36 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

Darwinism how changed from all this! How 
can Christianity survive the changes? 

One reassuring feature about scientific dis- 
covery is that, no matter how big the universe 
is, and no matter how long it has been run- 
ning, it seems to be composed throughout of 
the same elements that we find in our world. 
If a chemist could be transported from the 
earth to the sun, and could live there, he would 
not have to unlearn much of the earthly chem- 
istry. The same elements that we know here 
are in existence there. If the geologist could 
go back to the ages before man, he would find 
the same forces at work which w^e find at work 
to-day. Air and water and heat working 
through long periods have wrought the great 
changes. If he could go back and live in the 
carboniferous era, he w^ould probably find the 
situation there just what he might have ex- 
pected before starting. Now, these common 
everyday forces take on a new dignity when 
they are given field and time in which to act. 
Running water is not great taken on a few 
feet of river bed and for a few seconds of time, 
but give room enough and time enough, and a 
Grand Canyon is the result. It really re- 
quired some effort for science to see the im- 
portance of these everyday forces, and belief 

37 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

in their power was at first an act of faith. En- 
larging conceptions of religious life act simi- 
larly for Christian belief. They give the com- 
mon forces space and time through which to 
act. Of course the larger world presents a 
larger challenge to Christian faith than does 
a smaller ; but is faith to be outdone by science 
in the boldness of its conceptions? If science 
can believe that comparatively insignificant 
forces around us can be the shaping tools of 
the planets, w^hy cannot faith believe that the 
hopes and prayers of men are of vast spiritual 
significance? The very fact that man's abode 
is not the center of the universe makes, of 
course, a larger challenge to faith. Dare w^e 
believe that spiritual forces manifested in an 
out-of-the-way planet are the key to the under- 
lying forces of the universe? Dare we believe 
that righteousness and love wherever found 
are above all things else? Shall we be im- 
posed upon by the mere bigness and age of 
things? The larger universe which science 
reveals thus challenges us. The spirit of 
really scientific inquiry challenges us not to 
be lacking in a spirit of faith. Both science 
and religion must rely upon faith. 

A still more perplexed doubter points out 
our helplessness in the presence of the great 

38 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

fixities of nature. After all, how can we be 
sure that anything was made for our benefit? 
Some things in the world are usable by us, but 
what is there to assure us that these things 
were made for us? The stones were made by 
the slow geologic processes. We pave our 
streets or build our homes with them. It 
seems a little absurd to say that these stones 
were designed for us. We found the stones 
here and we used them. Similarly with the 
control of the forces of nature. We can direct 
the current a little, but we cannot radically 
change its course. We can control others and 
ourselves only by studying the streams of our 
lives, by immersing ourselves in them, and by 
slightly deflecting the flow here and there 
while swimming with the stream. Or, to 
change the figure, we are like children in 
whose hands the reins which guide the steed 
have fallen for a few blissful seconds, and 
even in our bliss we suspect that this privilege 
is allowed us because the horse can be trusted 
to go aright for at least a few rods. 

We are perfectly willing to admit all this, 
perfectly willing to allow the argument to be 
stated even more strongly. It does look 
absurd to say that the physical universe was 
made just for us. It may have other uses than 

39 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

just those which suit us. As a matter of fact, 
however, we can use the universe, and use it 
to good advantage. As a matter of fact, we 
shall use it to the full for our purposes, no 
matter what the absurdities in our assump- 
tion of our own importance. If there is any 
fact of the universe worth knowing, the scien- 
tist assumes the right to know that fact. If 
the universe can be put to any sort of use for 
human beings, we assume that it is the human 
beings, and not the material universe, which 
have the right of way. The great fixities of 
nature remain fixed, to be sure, but that not 
because we recognize in them especial sacred- 
ness. Just so far as we can we will change 
them, if we can do so to better human inter- 
ests. The old type of piety which detected an 
irreverent spirit in changing the course of 
streams, or in controlling electricity as in- 
terfering with the works of God, is dead and 
gone. We admit that we are powerless in the 
presence of some facts, but we are not power- 
less to protest against the facts. That old 
scoffer who said that if he had been present 
when the human eye was created he might 
have made some valuable suggestions may 
have been blasphemous in spirit ; but men who 
are not blasphemous actually do make im- 

40 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

provements in eyes. What we are insisting 
upon, however, is not our success in dealing 
with nature, for that is little enough. We do 
insist upon the significance of the daring as- 
sumption that underlies our battle with na- 
ture. Let the world be thought of as ever so 
big. The magnificent distances may seem to 
correct and chasten the spirit of faith both in 
science and religion, but the discovery of any 
new world is a mighty "dare^^ both to science 
and religion. Science responds with the as- 
sumption that the new facts can be fitted into 
our system of knowledge, and religion re- 
sponds with the assumption that the new 
facts can be made serviceable to belief. 
The spirit of faith both in its scientific and its 
religious aspect survives and increases as new 
problems are set by the unfolding of the uni- 
verse. 

But think of the limitations of our knowl- 
edge! Think of the insoluble problems! 
Well, suppose we do think of them. We find 
them hard enough. Every increase of knowl- 
edge is, as of old, an increase of sorrow, but, 
after all, the sorrow is not the sorrow of those 
who have no hope. We repeat that bad as are 
the facts of the physical universe, they are 
not prohibitive of faith; rather are they a 

41 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

challenge and an appeal to faith. Insoluble 
though they may be to us, they are not neces- 
sarily insoluble to a higher intelligence, or to 
our own intelligence under more enlightened 
circumstances. That is to say, there is noth- 
ing inherently self-contradictory or self-evi- 
dently absurd in these facts, hard as they are. 
Are we distressed by the vast immensities of 
the universe and by their apparent meaning- 
lessness? On earth the wastes of desert and 
water and ice I Throughout space the blazing 
suns and dead moons ! We admit that we do 
not understand, but is that a sign that these 
facts are beyond the reach of all intelligence? 
Are they such contradictions as the prop- 
osition that things which are equal to the 
same thing are not equal to each other? 
Admittedly we do not understand, but con- 
ceivably we may understand. The problem 
is not clearly beyond the reach of all intelli- 
gence. 

Or are we distressed by the fact of physical 
pain in the world? Even before we come to 
man there is pain enough. How can we recon- 
cile the presence of animal suffering with the 
assumption that God is good? If there were 
to be some moral outcome of animal suffer- 
ing, the situation might be different ; but, tak- 

42 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

ing animal life just as we see it, the problem Is 
rather dark. 

The problem is rather dark; but let us not 
make it darker than it is. Above all let us 
strive to avoid the error of thinking that the 
animals suffer as we would suffer if we were 
in the place of the animals. The tender 
mercies of nature are no doubt cruel enough, 
but animals are not men, after all. If we 
could abstract from our pain all that the 
power of looking before and after puts into 
it, and could divest pain of all the terrors that 
many times come with our understanding of 
its deadly significance, the pain itself might 
be notably diminished, though a toothache, 
for example, would still be its own wretched 
self. Still, let us make the fact of animal 
suffering as dreadful as we can. Let nature, 
red in tooth and claw with ravin, shriek ever 
so loudly against our creed. If the creed is at 
all vital, it can hope on in spite of the shrieks. 

The problem of human suffering — apart 
from the problem of moral evil, which does 
not fall within the scope of this lecture — is 
likewise not an insuperable barrier to faith. 
Here, again, we must be careful not to make 
the problem worse than it is. A favorite de- 
vice of pessimists is to imagine a sort of lump 

43 



THE INCREASE OP FAITH 

sum of human woe constantly added to by the 
sufferings of man until it reaches one awful 
total. The total of human sufferings from the 
beginning is, indeed, awful enough, but this 
lump sum is a fiction of the imagination. 
There has been much sickness from the begin- 
ning, but, on the whole, as a shrewd observer 
has said, "the race has been in tolerable 
health.'^ In spite of inequalities of social 
order pain gets pretty well distributed. Then 
there might be an increase of pain which 
would be a sign and result of material prog- 
ress. It is a well-known fact that the great 
losses in the human race are due to deaths in 
infancy. Suppose now, that science finds 
methods of increasing the chances of a child's 
living, so that for two who now die in infancy 
one would under the new order survive to ma- 
turity. Evidently, the survivor must die at 
maturity or beyond. This means, statistically, 
an increase in deaths from disorders of adult 
life, and might be made to seem very terrify- 
ing on paper. Again, in such case the death 
in maturity, because of the full development 
of consciousness and the possibility of looking 
ahead, and because too of the more numerous 
lines of connection with other human beings, 
would probably cause more conscious suffer- 

44 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

ing to the person himself and to others than 
would have been possible if the person had 
died in infancy. Yet we are not willing to 
have the work of the diminution of infant 
mortality stop on this account. 

We have no desire to make the problem of 
human suffering less than it really is. The 
fact that most of the people that have lived 
up to the present time have had no properly 
human existence, the probable fact that most 
of the persons on the face of the earth now 
have gone to sleep in the last twenty-four 
hours hungry, the fact of unspeakable hard- 
ship in the lot of individuals everywhere — all 
these are indeed facts. They are facts which 
throw many good people out of sympathy with 
the universe. Many look upon the universe as 
one long tragedy. They cannot find any clue 
to the meanings of nature or any insight into 
her moods. 

Nevertheless, in spite of all this faith lives 
on. Belief undertakes one explanation after 
another and all alike fall short. In spite of 
the shortcomings of the explanations belief 
survives. Looking at the fact of faith in a 
scientific spirit, we must ask for some reason 
for the persistence of the faith. Of course 
the Christian will answer that it is God him- 

45 



^RE INCREASE OF FAITH 

self who is prompting men to believe in him in 
spite of all temptations to the contrary. Our 
problem jnst now, however, is not as to the 
doctrine that God works, but as to how he 
works through the modern scientific spirit. 
Our answer is that the modern scientific spirit 
furnishes neither the glare of the noonday or 
the deep darkness of the midnight. It is, 
rather, a twilight atmosphere and, no matter 
how far it goes, it must always be twilight. 
Where everything is sun-clear and admitted 
fact there is not faith, as we understand faith. 
Where there is dense darkness there cannot be 
faith. For a race whose beliefs are to come 
out of a moral venture we must not know too 
much and we must not know too little. So 
we say that the modern scientific atmosphere 
does not prohibit belief. It in a measure 
aids belief, but it does not compel belief. It 
puts the facts of the universe before us in 
such a way that they make appeal to faith as 
to an heroic quality in men. Some day, it 
may be, we shall have the full light ; but who- 
ever or whatever has that full light, science 
has it not. Science moves in twilight. But 
in a measure she furnishes men with tools and 
a spirit to move on in the twilight. And the 
twilight gives us light enough to take the next 

46 



THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 

step. As moral beings under human condi- 
tions that is all we need. What the moral re- 
sponsibilities of angels or other celestial in- 
telligences may be in the blaze of the full light 
there is no call for us to consider. Our busi- 
ness is not with angels, but with men striving 
by moral endeavor to find God. For men we 
may express a confidence that this world of 
twilight furnishes the challenge and the test 
by which faith shows its heroic quality and 
by which it grows from more to more. For 
some purposes twilight is better than noon- 
day. 



47 



II 

THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

A FAMILIAR characterization of the progress 
of human history would have us believe that 
progress is never forward along a plane or 
straight up an incline, but that it is, rather, 
through the upward windings of a spiral with 
the gaze downward upon old and familiar 
facts seen ever from newer and higher alti- 
tudes. This characterization has especial 
force as applied to the history of philosophy. 
The charge is often made that philosophy is 
but a threshing of the same old straw, or a 
manipulation of the same old puzzles. The 
figure of the spiral is much truer. The prob- 
lems are, indeed, the same old problems, be- 
cause the problems are the great fundamentals 
of human experience. These problems are 
forever being seen, however, from a loftier 
height and in a wider circle. 

Within the memory of persons not yet past 
middle life the study of philosophy has made 
practically a complete turn in its spiral as- 

48 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

cent. The problems of matter, of mind, of 
personality, of truth are to-day viewed from 
a standpoint more favorable to faith than 
they were twenty-five years ago. 

It is commonly said to-day that materialism 
is no longer a living force in philosophy. This 
would seem to be an overstatement. Material- 
ism of the old fashion, with matter, force, and 
motion as they were conceived of in the early 
seventies, is not in vogue, but materialism 
which, while recognizing mind, nevertheless 
puts material processes so completely in the 
first place as to make mind dependent on 
matter, is still a factor to be reckoned with. 
There is reason to believe that the sympathies 
of agnosticism to-day are very close to essen- 
tial materialism. To be sure, the agnostic re- 
sents the title "materialist,'^ but too often 
agnosticism, apparently well meant and sin- 
cere, is a cover from which materialism 
emerges for a sort of guerrilla warfare and to 
which it retreats when at all seriously pur- 
sued. At least we may say that the camp of 
the agnostic does not hold many believers in 
the primacy of the mind. A mind which be- 
lieves in its own primacy will not long profess 
agnosticism. 

In discussing the passage away from the 

49 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

emphasis on the older, more outspoken mate- 
rialism we must not forget the great lasting 
benefit which came from that discussion. In 
that discussion the theory of evolution as an 
ascent by natural processes took more and 
more hold of the thinking of the time, all types 
of mind and all realms of study feeling its 
power. The theory was more than scientific 
in the strict sense of the term. It became a 
full philosophy with application to all phases 
of thinking. Now, any theory of ascent 
through struggle fits in so naturally with the 
spirit of aggressive Christianity, and this 
theory was so attractive, that, in spite of the 
avowed materialism of many of its first ad- 
herents, evolution was seized upon as express- 
ing an essentially Christian theory of the uni- 
verse. Considered simply as historic fact, the 
theory of evolution, at least in those stages in 
which Christian thinking had become at all 
adjusted to it, must be looked upon as one of 
the real forces making for an increase of faith. 
Even when we come to look at the theory of 
ascent through natural processes from the 
more critical standpoint of the present day we 
find much in it that lends comfort to belief. 
In the previous lecture we tried to show how 
chary we must be in professing to find direct 

50 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

revelations from any realm of nature, but, 
nevertheless, the thought of natural processes 
as moving in accordance with a law which 
sweeps them upward is in accordance w^ith a 
theistic and Christian view of the world. Ad- 
mitting that there is to-day no substantial 
agreement in the schools of the evolutionists 
upon a satisfactory definition of evolution, ad- 
mitting that there is some disagreement as to 
the relative importance of the various factors 
at work, admitting also that there is am- 
biguity in the use of the terminology of the 
evolutionists, as, for example, the oscillation 
back and forth between the survival of the fit 
as the survival of the merely fit to survive and 
the survival of the ethically fit, admitting that 
many facts which make against the theory are 
ignored or slurred over, still the truth remains 
that the present-day emphasis on upward 
movement described in evolutionary terms is 
a help to the view of the universe which faith 
holds. 

On the whole, too, the advance which has 
come out of the discussion of the evolutionary 
philosophy has been on the side of faith. The 
old-fashioned materialism which saw in the 
evolutionary processes merely the play and 
interplay of material factors with mental proc- 

51 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

esses as the shadowy and powerless accom- 
paniment of the material processes had, some- 
how, to meet the objection that, after all, 
the evolutionary theory itself is, on such a 
hypothesis, a shadowy attendant of no vital 
significance. It had to meet the objection that 
it is mind which has discovered and read oflf 
the process. If the most significant philo- 
sophical theory culminates in the contention 
as to the powerlessness of mind, the fact must 
remain that mind has been powerful enough 
to discover its own powerlessness. 

This, however, the thoroughgoing material- 
ist would reject as a quibble, though on his 
theory even quibbles must point to some fact 
in the physical system. An objection that the 
materialistic evolutionist could not wave aside 
was the objection out of which came the dis- 
tinction generally recognized to-day between 
evolution as a description of processes and 
evolution as a theory of causes. In the former 
evolution may be just the method by which 
Creative Intelligence proceeds. In the latter 
we have Evolution capitalized and going of 
itself, the real factors, of course, being ma- 
terialistic. Then we have the puzzle as to how 
that which is only matter can ever evolve into 
anything else than matter. If we start with 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

matter, we must end with matter unless some- 
thing is introduced along the line. Of course 
the impotence of the theory of materialistic 
evolution in this respect was clear to discern- 
ing students from the outset, but to-day there 
is pretty widespread recognition of the weak- 
ness. The distance between such a work as 
Bergson^s Creative Evolution and the early 
statements of evolutionary theory is clear at 
a glance; but, apart from the utterances of 
philosophers like Bergson, evolutionary the- 
ory which denies power to mind is offensive 
in a day which lays great stress on intellectual 
force, especially on that high form of intellec- 
tual force which we call administrative ability. 
In the practical life of to-day administrative 
skill is so rare as to win the highest prizes. 
The power to make things come together so as 
to reach any sort of right outcome is just the 
power which the man on the street feels must 
be put into an evolutionary process to get 
from it anything worth while. The ordinary 
man feels that if things are left to themselves, 
they fall to pieces or run downhill. Now, 
this language is fairly insolent to the philo- 
sophical materialist, but it does expresi^ an 
objection which comes naturally to the sur- 
face when we see the infinitely complex 

53 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

threads of the universe so managed as to come 
to a measurably intelligible result. 

How serious a problem this is for the 
philosophical materialist appears also from 
the fact of his insistence upon certain simplici- 
ties like cells and molecules and atoms and 
ions as the fundamental facts of the universe. 
If these are the fundamentals, all that we see 
is arrangement. Now, even though we abjure 
altogether the old-and-fast design arguments, 
we cannot get away from the suggestions of 
mental activity in the presence of arrange- 
ment. If it is urged that the arrangement is, 
after all, only in the mind, and is really illu- 
sion, we have to ask if the physical universe is 
such that its processes bring forth illusions. 
If the reply is that the illusion is born of 
mind, the reflection arises that mind must be 
rather powerful to beget such an illusion as 
that cells are arranged into plants and ani- 
mals. 

It is really on this question of mind that 
all theories of materialism go to pieces. The 
recognition of the activity of mind is another 
of those great recognitions which make for 
faith. Materialists of all sorts have aban- 
doned the crude notion that the brain secretes 
thought. In their emphasis upon mental proc- 

54 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

esses as the accompaniment of physical proc- 
esses the materialists are unable to make the 
connection more than coincidence. Their 
statement cannot provide a theory of knowl- 
edge. We cannot have a real theory of knowl- 
edge until we reach some provision for 
activity of consciousness. We have no desire 
to quarrel about terms. Whether we call the 
activity that of a soul, or a self, or a conscious- 
ness, or a stream of consciousness, we can 
have knowledge only as an agent of some sort 
reads off a meaning or builds up a picture. 
Suppose we were to hold that the outside 
world is reported to the mind by being photo- 
graphed there. A photograph is in itself a 
creation in space with every point lying out- 
side of every other point. It becomes a 
photograph only as a mind sees it, and the 
mind sees by building up the picture through 
a mental process of incredible activity and 
subtlety. 

And this begins to lead us off toward a dis- 
cussion of idealism as one of the contributing 
factors making for faith. Before we enter 
upon this phase of the discussion, however, 
we call attention to the truth that the empha- 
sis upon evolution and naturalistic processes 
makes an atmosphere in which the old sub- 

55 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

jective idealism does not thrive. Whether the 
universe lies outside of all thought or not, 
we are certainly most in harmony with the in- 
tellectual temper of to-day in insisting that 
the universe has its reality outside of our 
thought in the sense that we did not create it. 
The student of the evolutionary process is not 
likely to allow himself to be persuaded that 
the process is a process simply in his own 
mind. To say that the universe is grounded 
in thought is one thing. To say that it is 
grounded in our thought is quite another. It 
is this latter conception that is hardly likely 
to thrive in the mind of one who knows geol- 
ogy and biology and bacteriology. In ad- 
dition to the favorable atmosphere which the 
discussion of evolution has begotten for faith, 
we must see in the stubborn facts of material- 
ism a correction for faith. Xo one can tell 
what absurdity the spirit of faith might foster 
to-day if the barrier of a great objective order 
were not in the way. 

As we have indicated, we need not pay 
much attention to subjective idealism. Still, 
there is a current form of idealism which is 
of mighty meaning. It starts from the fact 
which we have mentioned above — the consti- 
tutive activity of the mind in knowing. When 

56 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

one has really seen this another truth dawns 
upon one, namely, that nothing which mind 
cannot seize can ever be known. To be seized 
by mind the object must be penetrated by re- 
lationships which reach the inmost essence; 
that is to say, the object must be constituted 
throughout by thought Here is the great con- 
tribution of idealism to the spirit of faith. 
Nothing hnoicable can exist save as the ex- 
pt^ession of intelligence. Here is the very 
heart of the modern argument for theism. 
Things must either come within thought or go 
out of existence. Any sort of hard-and-fast 
stuff apart from thought is out of the ques- 
tion. To affirm that any such sort of stuff 
exists is to bring it within thought relation- 
ships. So far as our minds are concerned, it 
would be too great a strain on a theory to 
make us, finite intelligences, responsible for 
the creation of the thought system in the midst 
of which we live. But we cannot understand 
the world until w^e affirm that whoever laid its 
foundations laid them in thought. A knowa- 
ble universe is one of the great supports of 
theism. 

No sooner, however, had philosophy fixed 
on the constitutive processes of the mind as 
essential than it forgot the individual minds 

57 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

whose activities had furnished a clue to the 
problem and began to speak of thought itself 
as the controlling force. The philosophers 
did not say ^^Thinkers'^ or "Thinker'^; they 
said "Thought/^ Thought, at least by impli- 
cation impersonal, was the great source and 
center of all things. The study of the move- 
ment away from this position, like the study 
of the movement away from the early state- 
ments of naturalism, is full of instruction. 
The contribution of this idealism to theistic 
thinking is, in all likelihood, an immortal one, 
but the clarifications which have come with 
the effective criticism of the system as a 
system are hardly less important. The ideal- 
ist of the type we are now considering thought 
of the universe as the unfolding of a system of 
logical implications. In the Hegelian lan- 
guage the movement was thesis^ as when an 
affirmation is made, antithesis^ as when the 
contradictory is developed, synthesis^ as when 
a ground of reconciliation is reached between 
a proposition and its contradictory. The uni- 
verse is here conceived of as an evolution in 
logic. The evolution as set forth by the Hege- 
lian school was profoundly impressive, as im- 
pressive in its way as the materialistic evolu- 
tion of the early Darwinians. At one point 

58 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

the same criticism is to be passed upon the 
Hegelian evolution as was passed upon ma- 
terialistic evolution. In both systems it was 
impossible on the basis of the system itself to 
get more out of the system than the adherent^ 
started with. If matter is all, there is no use 
searching for anything but matter in the out- 
come. If impersonal thought is all, imper- 
sonal thought is the outcome. In any strict 
logical procedure we cannot get more into the 
conclusion than there is in the premises. If 
the universe is the expression of the thought 
of a Living Mind, we can see how the evolu- 
tionary process moves from lower to higher — 
it moves as new factors are continuously in- 
troduced. If the universe is the expression of 
a Living Mind moving according to logic, that 
Mind must move as ours do to get anything 
like progress — it must introduce factors which 
are really outside of and above the strict logi- 
cal chain. Acute thinkers have maintained 
that even in the strictest mathematical reason- 
ing there is this introduction of factors from 
without the strict line of reasoning. But ideal- 
ism which turns around impersonalism is not 
entitled to put anything but strict logic in, 
and therefore can get nothing out but the 
premises with which the reasoning began. For 

59 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

religious purposes there is not much choice be- 
tween impersonal matter and impersonal 
reason. 

A further difficulty with the idealistic 
systems of the impersonal type is that there 
is really no way of getting any movement into 
them. We speak, indeed, of logical move- 
ments, but the movement is not in the logic. 
Logic does not move. Something else moves 
according to logic. Logic is simply the 
statement of the rule of procedure. We can 
see how this illusion arises. In the world 
around us events do seem to progress accord- 
ing to an inner logic. We speak of the logic 
of a movement or of a situation. We say that 
the logic of the case forbids a man or a cause 
to stop at a particular place. There is a logi- 
cal necessity for going on. Or the expression 
of a proposition by one party does make neces- 
sary the expression of the contrary by the 
opposition, and the conflict between the two 
must finally be reconciled. But in all of this 
the movement is not in any system of imper- 
sonal logic. The movement is in men and in 
events. Sooner or later this is apt to dawn on 
the believer in impersonal idealism, and then 
he feels prone to dismiss the world of move- 
ment as appearance, perhaps as illusion. The 

60 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

final reality becomes the universe of fixed 
logical relationships. This universe, on the 
impersonalist theory, is not the vision before 
the eyes of a living God whose mental life is 
forever at the full. It is not a beatific vision 
which might be worth while for religious re- 
flection. It is impersonal — a framework from 
which everything of living significance has 
been left out. We do not even have a "ballet 
of bloodless categories." The categories are 
indeed bloodless enough, but there is no pro- 
vision for the movement of a ballet. In spite 
of what we have said about the logic by which 
men and events often seem to move, we must 
now say that this movement is not possible to 
pure logic after all. Life comes first and logic 
afterward, with the driving power in life. 
Now, however it may be with the highly de- 
veloped logical tastes of the strict intellec- 
tualist, the practical exclusion of the world 
of movement from life as appearance or illu- 
sion is not a result especially satisfactory 
from the religious point of view. 

A further objection to impersonal idealism 
is its inability to furnish any sort of ground 
for moral distinctions. The idealist would in- 
sist most strenuously that logical necessity is 
stronger even than the physical necessity of 

61 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

materialism. But while there might con- 
ceivably be inequalities of pressure in a sys- 
tem of mechanical stresses and strains there 
can hardly be such inequalities in logical ne- 
cessity. There the necessity is distributed over 
all parts alike. In a necessity of this sort 
there is no justification for words like "free- 
dom'' and "good'' and "bad" in the moral 
sense. All things that are, are : that is the be- 
ginning and the end. Good, bad, and indif- 
ferent are morally all alike. All we can say 
is that the feeling for the good in us is part of 
the logical system, that the feeling toward the 
bad is produced by the same system, that the 
conflict between the two is produced by the 
underlying logic, that the "give-and-take" of 
all conflicts is the expression of logical neces- 
sity. The emphasis on the reconciliation in 
the final synthesis does not help much. The 
question is as to how the differences ever 
started. Moreover, reconciliation morally 
takes place as each side is willing to give up 
something in concession. Whither in such 
case do the dropped-out elements of the con- 
troversy go? If they are aliens, how did they 
ever get in? The way to get around all such 
questions is, of course, to ignore them. Under- 
stand, now, we are not discussing these ques- 

62 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

tions primarily with a philosophic motive. 
We are interested chiefly in religious values, 
and we have to record our feeling that there 
is not much aid and comfort for religion in a 
theory which by logical necessity puts all 
moral conceptions on the same plane. 

By this time the purely verbal character of 
impersonal idealism ought to be clear to us. 
The reconciliations of contradictions are 
largely verbal. Everything is pasted together 
under one term like the ^^Absolute'^ or "All.'^ 
Of course nothing is done to things themselves 
in thus giving them a name. By the way, it 
is worth while remembering that much of the 
skepticism of religious fundamentals which has 
come out of the Hegelian camp is really verbal. 
How can the absolute ever take up relations 
to the purely relative? How can the infinite 
come into contact with the finite without ceas- 
ing to be infinite? All this is empty. Re- 
ligion is not concerned to maintain an Abso- 
lute of this purely verbal nature. The passion 
for unity is entirely intelligible in its aim and 
purpose, but it is hard to see how so imperious 
a passion can be satisfied with so meager an 
outcome as throwing all things together and 
calling them "All.'' And while the way to- 
ward this abstraction is easy enough, the way 

63 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

back is sorely beset. We can get an "All" by 
calling all things all, but even with the most 
potent logic it is not possible to deduce the 
world of concrete things as we see them by 
looking upon the All. Admitting that every- 
thing in the conclusion must be in the prem- 
ises, and stocking these premises with all 
the possibilities of the concrete world, we find 
ourselves unable to deduce a single concrete 
item from our philosophy. We are told that 
logic reigns in all things, but we cannot de- 
duce a single thing. And taking the world of 
things inductively, we cannot tell why any- 
thing is after we find it. We cannot tell why 
any particular thing should be as it is and not 
otherwise. All this would not distress us so 
much if we were admittedly living in a world 
where logic played but little part; but in a 
world where logic is professedly everything it 
is embarrassing not to be able to make more 
use of logic. 

Among the most concrete facts in our con- 
crete world is the individual person. Just 
how to get this world of persons out of a 
system of impersonal thought is a hopeless 
puzzle. By what processes of thesis, antith- 
esis, and synthesis can we make the in- 
dividuals whom we know fit into a system? 

64 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

The last thing we can do with the men 
and women and children whom we know 
is to deduce them. If logic is lame in 
trying to deduce a material universe, what 
can we say of it in connection with a universe 
of persons? The fact is that in all utterances 
about persons as deductions or specifications 
or generalizations of impersonal thought the 
thinker has his reasonings curiously reversed. 
Thinkers are really first and thoughts are 
second. But some thought w^as in the uni- 
verse before we in particular arrived, and 
hence it is easy for the mind to hide behind its 
own product, spelling Thought with a capital 
and making the thinker the product of 
Thought. Of course no thinker would be 
guilty of saying that he himself is the product 
of his own thinking, but it is easy for anyone 
to think of himself as the product of Thought 
which antedated himself — thence the conclu- 
sion becomes possible that Thought antedates 
all thinkers. 

Some suspicion of the difficulty at this 
point seems to haunt the theories of all abso- 
lute idealists. The only meeting of the diffi- 
culty, however, is no meeting at all, but, 
rather, an avoidance of it. An ambiguous 
term like "Reason'^ is used. At one moment 

65 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

Reason is impersonal thought. At another 
moment Eeason is a Reasoner. At one mo- 
ment Intelligence is impersonal thought. At 
another it is an active mind. Some idealists 
come out openly with the avowal that they do 
not believe in absolute idealism as an imper- 
sonal system of thought. They believe in 
Eternal Consciousness which wells up in in- 
dividuals. All men are parts of the Eternal 
Consciousness. Persons melt and fuse into 
one another or, rather, into an all-embracing 
Consciousness. This view has two considera- 
tions in its favor. First is the historic fact 
of the persistence of the view itself. It has 
probably been held over wider reaches of space 
and time than any other serious philosophical 
construction of the universe, not in the Hege- 
lian form indeed, but in various forms which 
show Oriental or semi-Oriental influences. 
Second, there is something in some phases of 
conscious experience which seems to support 
the conception. In moments of surpassing 
friendship it is possible for ono heart to enter 
into such sympathy with another that two 
personalities seem at least for the instant to 
be fused. Or in transports of feeling which 
sweep over men in groups the individual seems 
lost in the mob, or crowd, or group, or national 

66 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

consciousness. This suggests the possibility 
of like emotional approach to an Eternal Con- 
sciousness above and including what we look 
upon as finite consciousness. 

But the philosophical objections come back 
with even greater vigor, especially the problem 
of evil. It is bad enough if all the evils in the 
world are deductions or specifications of our 
impersonal system of thought. It is worse, 
for religious values at least, if individual sin- 
ners are parts of an Eternal Consciousness. 
The desire of the sinner for his sin and his 
joy in his sin are not merely reflections of a 
desire and joy on the part of the Eternal Con- 
sciousness : they are directly and immediately 
the desire and joy of the Eternal Conscious- 
ness. The Eternal Consciousness is Eternal 
Saint and Eternal Sinner in one. Then there 
is the difficulty of getting the individual con- 
sciousness as we know it into any sort of re- 
lation to the Eternal Consciousness. The mis- 
leading expression ^^Stream of Consciousness'' 
has played a harmful influence here. Streams 
can be diverted from the main channel and 
can be run through sluiceways even down to 
capillary proportions. But consciousness is 
not a stream, except by figure of speech. It is 
an active and indivisible unity. Suppose we 

67 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

drop the word "consciousness'^ and ask as to 
the possibility of so dealing with a man as to 
run him off into sluiceways which become 
other men! If we think of the Eternal Con- 
sciousness as a Creative Will we can say that 
the finite men are creations of that will, but 
one will cannot be part of another will. 

And so we are back again to the finite wills 
which make up the world of persons. The 
mind refuses to yield to materialism on the 
one hand or to absolute idealism on the other. 
The way out is through personalism, the recog- 
nition of the living individualities around us 
as the points from w^hich our thinking must 
start. We find ourselves in communication 
with other minds, and as we reflect upon the 
possibility of such communication we see 
clearly that the communication must have 
come about through the possibility of using 
the world as an instrument and medium for 
the communication of thought. But the 
world clearly is independent of our thinking. 
Back of it there must be a Thinker greater 
than ourselves. In attributing personality to 
the Cause of the universe we do not mean per- 
sonality with the limitations of human con- 
ditions. We seize upon personality as the 
very highest power we know, and think of 

6S 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

the Cause of all things in terms of personal 
life. 

The objection to the personality of God 
once took the form of emphasis upon the limi- 
tations of personality, whereas God must be 
thought of as the absolute and unlimited. 
Much of the discussion on the point was pure- 
ly verbal, but the point itself seemed to be 
valid. To-day there is a rather strongly 
marked protest against such absolutism in the 
thought of God. A God who is infinite in the 
sense that he is above all relations to the 
finite, absolute in the sense that he cannot 
touch the relative, eternal in the sense that 
all that happens in time is illusion for him, 
is not a God of the highest value religiously. 

Two attempts to deliver the Power back of 
all things from the emptiness of absolutism 
are worthy of note. Professor William James 
gave the last years of his life to the doctrine 
of a finite God. It is fairly difficult to make 
much of a system out of anything that James 
did. Jameses whole soul seemed to be in a 
state of chronic revolt against any suggestion 
of system. At one time he seemed to be sym- 
pathetic with the philosophy of Mill and Bain 
and Spencer. At another he lent direct aid 
and encouragement to the most orthodox Chris- 

69 



THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 

tianity. In a private letter to a friend he de- 
clared that in his belief of the reality of the 
play of spiritual forces upon the individual 
life he could out-Methodist the Methodists. 
It is clear that while James would have scru- 
ples over such a term as "theist'^ he was, 
nevertheless, a believer in God. But for him 
God is a limited person among other persons. 
James carried belief in pluralism to great 
lengths. He saw no objection to believing 
that the individual finite soul will exist for- 
ever, and quite likely would have been willing 
to hold a belief that the individual souls have 
existed forever. Among these lives, or streams 
of consciousness, God is the greatest. Just 
how to provide for unity in such a scheme 
James would not have cared. Quite likely he 
would have been willing to hold that time and 
space are a vast theater on which God and 
angels and men play their several parts. In 
all this James would have said that he was 
serving religious interests — that he was con- 
tending not for a barren abstraction but for 
the living God, the God of Abraham and Isaac 
and Jacob. The philosophical objections to 
the theory are apparent at a glance. But the 
religious value is by no means slight. James 
would bring God within reach, even though 

70 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

he had to resort to dubious theological expe- 
dients to accomplish the result. 

The other attempt is by Bergson. Berg- 
son's interest does not seem to be especially 
religious. For God in the ordinary sense of 
the word he would have no place at all. But 
he does speak of God as Life, Freedom, Move- 
ment unfolding in new and altogether unpre- 
dictable manifestations. Life is spelled with 
a capital and is responsible for the forward 
push which means progress. There is all the 
difference in the world between evolution as 
conceived of by Bergson and evolution as con- 
ceived of by the Spencerians. Spencerianism, 
and even Darwinism, for that matter, is no- 
where subjected to more searching criticism 
than in Bergson's Creative Evolution. Life 
is conceived of after the analogy of conscious- 
ness to such an extent that matter itself seems 
at times to be a product of consciousness. Yet 
consciousness is not the formal intellectual 
life as we know it. We can hardly tell just 
what Bergson conceives consciousness to be, 
but his suggestions point to intuition and feel- 
ing as nearer the heart of reality than is the 
speculative intellect. Bergson overlooks the 
truth that the concrete facts with which we 
have to do are just the individual lives. He 

71 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

throws a blanket-term, "Life/^ over all these. 
There is no way of getting from "Life'' to 
lives. There is no attempt at answering the 
score of questions that crowd upon us when 
we try to come to close quarters with the sys- 
tem. But Bergson's view does have this great 
virtue — it is alive and it does provide for a 
real struggle with a growing reality. What- 
ever God Bergson would admit at all is him- 
self in the movement. God is himself move- 
ment and struggle and development. Just 
where Bergson would find anything to stand 
across the flow of life and measure the flow, or 
even discern the flow, is nowhere told us, but 
the impression Bergson produces is whole- 
some. We are in the presence of real forces 
engaged in real movement. Whatever God 
there is, is not afar off in the heavens, but is 
here now. God is not satisfactory from the 
standpoint of speculative intellect, but the 
speculative intellect is not itself satisfac- 
tory. The deep life-needs must be satisfied. 
If we are willing to put the critical under- 
standing to one side and resolve not to ask 
questions, there is much in Bergson's book 
that is stimulating and even bracing. His God 
too, if he has one, is a God of the living. 
But works like those of James and Bergson 

72 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

have their chief value as protests, and as pro- 
tests their value is great. It is the conviction 
of the present writer that religious thinking 
has suffered harm from the systematic theo- 
logians who have laid such stress on the meta- 
physical perfections of God that his value as 
an object to be sought for worship and com- 
panionship has been seriously impaired. To 
take a single illustration, the establishment 
of the doctrine of the ideality of time is a great 
philosophical achievement. It is to be doubted 
whether in the history of philosophy there has 
been more profound reasoning than that which 
has gone to show that time is essentially a 
mental form under which the mind works, 
that a man^s present is in a sense equivalent 
to the range of his mental activity, that with 
the Supreme Intelligence there may be a grasp 
which makes all things present. Now, while 
this doctrine is clear enough to the metaphy- 
sician, it may be so stated as to harm religious 
life. It may be so interpreted as to mean that 
with God everything of life and movement is 
of slight consequence. Or it may be taken to 
mean that with God everything is jumbled 
jinto a confused happening together. The 
most serious result, however, is that which 
would make change mean nothing for God. 

73 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

God is changeless in what sense? In the sense 
that his own development is forever at the full, 
but not in the sense that the changes on earth 
and in men mean nothing to him. A satisfac- 
tory construction of the reality of change for 
God may be beyond us, but in that case we 
would better leave the question of construc- 
tion open rather than close it with a philos- 
ophy that does harm to the religious needs of 
the human heart. While we must not give 
ourselves up to contradictions of logic, we 
must follow James and Bergson in putting 
the claims of life above those of the strictly 
speculative intellect. 

So then we accept the challenge of the 
modern protests against the absolute and the 
infinite and declare for certain limitations in 
a God who is to be a living force with men. 
It may appear later that these limitations are 
in part self-assumed and in part the expres- 
sions of moral fullness of life, but in any case 
we must get God near to men. It is worth 
while to make the Almighty mighty. 

In the first place, a Creator of the universe 
is bound by the creations which he makes. We 
have spoken of the universe as founded in 
thought. If there is nothing in existence 
apart from thought, and the universe is a vast 

74 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

set of activities expressing thought, the 
thought must move according to a divine 
grammar and syntax and rhetoric if it is to 
be of service for men. Men must not be dis- 
mayed if they cannot understand all of the 
language, but they may expect to understand 
some of it. The universe may not be intelli- 
gible, but it must be more than a set of inco- 
herent ejaculations. This requirement would 
rule out arbitrary whim and caprice. Now, 
thus far there would seem to be no limitation 
upon the divine beyond the requirement that 
every utterance be rational, which is, of 
course, not to be thought of as a limitation. 
But when we think of the universe as a system 
we must think of the Creator as tied up to the 
demands of that system. That is to say, if 
there is to be system, the Creator cannot 
thereafter treat a particular part as if it stood 
by itself alone. He might treat it otherwise 
than he does if it stood alone, or if it were part 
of a smaller system, or if it were in a different 
system. Some thinkers have gone so far as 
to seek for an explanation of the problem of 
evil in the conflicts which may arise between 
the good of the parts of the system and the 
good of the whole of the system. Without 
subscribing to such extreme doctrine we may 

75 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

all admit that the carrying on of a finite 
system puts limitations on the Cause back of 
it. These limitations come to even clearer 
light when we think of the relations between 
the Cause and Ground of all things and the 
individual souls as we know them. Espe- 
cially is this true if we are to think of the in- 
dividuals as free. How to establish freedom 
speculatively we do not pretend to say, but 
the objections to freedom have usually been in 
the name of an Absolute or Infinite for whom 
or for which freedom of men would be a dis- 
turbing factor. If the world is Absolute Mat- 
ter or Absolute Idea, freedom for the individ- 
ual seems out of the question. If the World- 
Cause is a Person whose sovereignty must not 
be divided with any other will whatsoever, the 
freedom of the individual must be given up. 
But, on the other hand, freedom at least seems 
to be here as a throbbing fact in the life of the 
individual. We are all forced to admit the 
real limitations upon this freedom. It may 
be that many of our choices even when we 
seem to ourselves most free are the play and 
interplay of underlying necessities, but after 
every such admission we have to come back 
to the conviction of the fact of freedom in the 
individual. Over against this is the neces- 

76 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

sity of some limitation for the Back-Lying 
Power. Why not accept the limitation? If 
an individual is free, the Cause and Ground 
of things must accept limitations upon him- 
self as a consequence of that freedom. The 
old picture of the master leading a servant is 
in place here. The chain binds the servant, 
but it also limits the master. How much more 
real is the limitation if the servant is rebel- 
lious or sulky? This is only a poor illustra- 
tion, to be sure, but it has at least a sugges- 
tive value. If there are free individuals in the 
world, their wills must be taken into account 
in physical and mental and moral spheres. 
There is the possibility of conflict between the 
souls of men and the soul of God, or there is 
the possibility of cooperation. Even in the 
latter case, however, there is limitation for 
God. The best human will may be so slow as 
to impose delay upon a divine will. All this 
is at times obscured by the fact that after a 
clearly evil course has been chosen by human 
wills good seems to result in the end — which, 
of course, can mean only that a Higher Intelli- 
gence has made the best possible of a bad 
situation. 

Furthermore, we can see that there must be 
limitation for God in any special work of 

77 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

revelation which he wills to undertake. If the 
movement is to show itself through a national 
development, the laws which govern national 
life must be observed. Now, it has long been 
the special claim of Christianity that God has 
for his glory that he is willing to take upon 
himself limitations for the sake of reaching 
men. One of the great attractions of the doc- 
trine of incarnation for men has been the 
thought that in the incarnation the gift of God 
has really meant cost to God. The Christian 
thinker has always maintained that the will- 
ingness of God to assume limitations has come 
out of the moral fullness of the divine life. 
One of the encouraging signs of present-day 
religious thinking is the movement aw^ay from 
the God of the abstract to the God of the con- 
crete, in spite of the fact that connection with 
the concrete means limitation. 

But what becomes of the modern doctrine 
of the divine immanence if such considera- 
tions as those just adduced are allow^ed to 
have sway? Has not the doctrine of imma- 
nence as held to-day been a help to faith in 
bringing God near? Undoubtedly it has, but 
undoubtedly also it has wrought some confu- 
sion to faith. God is in all things in one sense, 
but not in all senses. There are degrees of 

78 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

nearness. God is in the world in the sense 
that the world is the expression of his thought 
and activity. But all thoughts are not the 
same thoughts. We have to keep away from 
that old fallacy of ^^Thought" spelled with a 
capital. The world is not so much Thought as 
thoughts. The value of the doctrine of imma- 
nence is that it does away with the idea of any 
sort of mechanical existence with laws of its 
own which God must break in order to reach 
men. This, however, merely furnishes a start- 
ing point. The thought of God in a particular 
situation can be determined only from a study 
of that situation. God is in the lives of men, 
but not in the lives of all men alike. He is in 
the lives of bad men. In him even the worst 
of men live and move and have their being. 
But in what sense is God in the life of a bad 
man? In the sense that he is giving the gift 
of life even to a bad man, and seeking to work 
through the life of the man to lift him out of 
evil. But God is not in the bad man in the 
same sense that he is in the good man. In one 
sense God is near all men alike. In another 
sense everything depends upon the man. 
There really have to be about as many phras- 
ings of the doctrine of divine nearness as 
there are different men. 

79 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

But all this seems to leave us at amazingly 
loose ends. We have not a system of the kind 
to which we have been used. No, we have not, 
but we have an open world before us. We 
have finite lives which can come progressively 
nearer to God. 

And here we reach at last a final question. 
We have seen the movement away from the 
old materialism, through absolute idealism to 
personalism. It is in the lives of persons that 
we are to seek for fuller revelations of divine 
life. But what, after all, in the lives of these 
persons is to give us the clue to the truth for 
which we seek? 

There is an answer ready at hand in a popu- 
lar movement which is called pragmatism. It 
may be well to approach this final question 
through some suggestions thrown out by this 
present-day system of philosophical thinking. 
Pragmatism is the affirmation that beliefs are 
to be tested by their consequences in the life of 
the believers. There is really nothing new in 
the system except the brilliancy of the treat- 
ment of men like James and the extraordinary 
vogue which the system, if it can be called 
a system, has reached through falling in with 
the urgent demands of the time for emphasis 
upon practical results and actual contacts 

80 



I 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

with the life which we are now living. All 
that is important in the system reaches back 
to Kant. It will be remembered that Kant 
showed that formal proof of the existence of 
God and of the facts of freedom and immortal 
life is impossible. He did, however, insist that 
these ideas are the postulates of the practical 
reason. While we cannot formally prove them 
to be true, we, nevertheless, hold fast to them 
for their practical value. While they are not 
constitutive principles of the reason, they are 
in a profound sense regulative principles not 
only for reason but for life. The line of phil- 
osophical development, however, did not fol- 
low from Kant's emphasis on the practical 
reason. It went through Fichte to Hegel and 
the absolute idealist. Then came Ritschl in 
protest against the absolute idealists with his 
denial of any considerable place in theology 
for speculative methods of the metaphysical 
eort. For him religious ideas were "value- 
judgments'^ showing their worth by their value 
in life. 

There is not much sign that the pragmatists 
of to-day know the Ritschlian system. There 
is nothing German about present-day prag- 
matism. It is impatient of that systemization 
which we think of as characteristically Ger- 

81 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

man. And pragmatism is not in the slightest 
degree theological in its origin. James him- 
self began his work with studies in physiology* 
It was only in quite late years that his reli- 
gious interest became outspoken. Moreover, 
pragmatism is quite ambitious. It would ask 
us to accept a criterion for truth in all realms. 
Like the believers in all new systems, the be- 
lievers in the all-suflS.ciency of pragmatism 
carry their claims to great extremes. And all 
sorts and conditions of men claim to be prag- 
matists. In some puttings of the belief it 
would seem that pragmatism would allow a 
man to believe all that works well with him, 
or that agrees with him, or that he fancies. A 
man might preach the doctrine of the brother- 
hood of man, or he might be a follower of 
Nietzsche, and still be a pragmatist. He might 
be an individualist or a socialist, a theist or 
a pantheist, or a polytheist or a pluralist or an 
absolutist. As a matter of historic truth the 
pressure of real or fancied life-needs has been 
back of all these beliefs. When we hear that 
a man is a pragmatist the next question may 
well be as to what else he is. Accepting prag- 
matism may mean that the door is open to ac- 
cepting anything or everything else. 

The man who first hears of pragmatism 
82 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

may feel that at last the way is open for him 
to believe anything or everything or nothing, 
just as he pleases. A teacher in ethics has 
pointed out that one hearing the principles of 
Epicurus for the first time might imagine 
that at last the doors are open to all manner 
of pleasure-seeking with the sanction of 
ethical precept, but that such a one will find 
as soon as he comes close to his problem that, 
after all, many doors are closed. So with 
pragmatism, for pragmatism with its doctrine 
of consequences as the test of truth must 
recognize : 

1. The existence of an objective order. The 
consequences must be the consequences of the 
long run. A man might declare that the con- 
sequences are best for him in denying the 
existence of a material world, and he might 
get on comfortably with the belief for a while, 
but not for long. 

2. The pragmatist must make some conces- 
sion to logiCy else there would be no sense in 
reasoning. It would seem rather absurd to 
try to find a system with no reliance upon 
logic. Of course some pragmatists go so far 
as to make even mathematical axioms prac- 
tical postulates, virtually denying the mind 
any power of insight on its own account. 

83 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

3. The pragmatist must concede the exis- 
tence of others besides himself^ but with this 
concession there must be a social as well as an 
individual set of consequences for beliefs, and 
the two sets will often come into conflict. 
There is no relief here on the pragmatist basis. 

4. The pragmatist must yield to the au- 
thority of consequences as these have revealed 
themselves in great individuals. 

5. The pragmatist must take into account 
inner as well as outer consequences, else the 
system will sink into a low order of utilita- 
rianism. The most practical consequences are 
not necessarily outer. 

Thus we might go on. Still, after we have 
said all this we must say further that the 
preaching of the pragmatic j)hilosophy does 
pave the way for the preaching of an essen- 
tially Christian doctrine. The Founder of 
Christianity taught that discipleship means 
the doing of the deeds of the kingdom, that he 
that heareth the words and doeth them is the 
one who gets the rock foundation, that he 
that doeth the will of God shall know the doc- 
trine of God. Christ came that men might 
have life, but life has deeper roots than specu- 
lation. Life flowers out into Christian con- 
sciousness and Christian consciousness in 

84 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

turn sends new powers back into the root and 
tree and branch. 

Our long discussion comes to this — that the 
movements of modern philosophy are not 
away from faith, but, rather, in the direction 
of faith. Nothing in philosophy itself can 
establish the Christian standpoint; but noth- 
ing in philosophy can block the way of Chris- 
tian revelation, and much can aid that revela- 
tion. There are no mechanical or idealistic 
systems which, standing in their own light, 
are a barrier to the demands of Christian life. 

The demands of Christian life ! Life shows 
itself in its power to make demands and to 
seize what it requires to satisfy those demands. 
The Christian conception needs the idea of a 
material universe in which God shows at least 
a measure of this thought. While we might 
never suspect the presence of God in the world 
from an inductive scrutiny alone, we do find 
signs of his presence when we search for the 
plan which we feel must be there. We need 
the idea of a vast spiritual organism, a body 
of God, which is to set forth the immensity of 
the divine Life, and as we work with this de- 
mand in mind we find a satisfaction which 
we believe is an indication that we are on the 
path to the truth. We feel the need of the 

85 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

presence of God in the life of the individual, 
and we hold fast to the idea of prayer, not for 
extraordinary answers here and there, but for 
the increasing life in him who prays. 

It may seem to some that we have made out 
a rather fragmentary and broken plight for 
current philosophic thinking. This is just 
the advantage which confronts the student to- 
day. The tight systems are broken up. The 
windows and the doors are open. It is per- 
missible for us to believe that the divine Spirit 
is near enough to us to find us and to help us 
on and up. Whatever seems to be on and up 
we shall reach after. And if we find ourselves 
moving on and up, we shall feel that we are 
on the right path. 

Of course truth is truth and finally stands 
in its own right. But the final truth which 
thus stands in its own right is not the truth 
of speculative statement, but the truth of life. 
A life, a moral person — this is the good on its 
own account. If this is the good-in-itself, we 
have to consider speculative statements in 
somewhat of an instrumental capacity. They 
are the tools by which the mind takes its direc- 
tion and surveys its path. A belief may be 
useful for one time and not for another. Or, 
to make the matter more vital still, the belief 

86 



THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 

is the food — or part of the food — on which the 
life feeds. The final test is the test of life. 
And thus the life moves on toward God. The 
world is open; the sky is free. Whatever the 
life finds necessary for its growth it will take. 
It cannot make itself at home in the world by 
denying the facts of science, or the truths of 
logic, or the foundations of social order. It 
will search for the truth in any system which 
has presented itself or which will present it- 
self. It will live upon the truth of the system 
so far as it can and will throw away the error. 
If some object that this is unsystematic 
eclecticism, the onh^ reply is that life is al- 
ways eclectic. The living organism lays hold 
on air and sunshine and water and food in 
large variety for the sake of preserving and 
propagating itself. The great revelation is 
through the organism which we may call the 
body of the Spirit of God — the family of be- 
lievers in God. Formal statements are the 
outputs of the vitality of this organism. The 
statements must not be so held as to smother 
or crush the life of the organism itself. For 
that life itself is the center around which all 
else should turn. A revealing God must limit 
himself to the persons through whom he 
works, but through the lives obedient to him 

87 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

he makes an increasingly large and significant 
revelation of himself. The life of a good man 
stands in its own right because — paradoxical 
as the words seem — it points beyond itself to 
the life of God. 



88 



Ill 

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

It is the aim of this lecture to show that the 
widening of the social horizon works in aid 
of faith by bringing into prominence the great 
human ideals. Anything which lays stress on 
what we may call essential humanity works 
for faith. It may be that the upholders of 
ideals of human rights in political and indus- 
trial and social realms are not themselves 
adherents of religious beliefs. Agitators and 
propagandists of doctrines which work for 
lofty human ideals may themselves be agnos- 
tics or skeptics so far as religious beliefs are 
concerned, and yet, all unconsciously to them- 
selves, may be working for the increase of re- 
ligious faith. Anything which exalts our con- 
ception of what human life ought to be is a 
veritable revealer of God. We cannot enrich 
a human ideal without at the same time en- 
riching our idea of God. 

At the very outset of such a discussion we 
are met by the urgent insistence of those who 

89 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

hold to the doctrine of the economic interpre- 
tation of history, that the effective force in 
setting human ideals high in the thinking of 
men has not been the perception of those 
ideals themselves. Physical necessities have 
been the great driving powers, we are told. 
Hunger, the demand for better houses and 
costlier raiment — these are the compelling 
forces. We do not feel any need to discuss 
this claim at length. We may, however, ven- 
ture one or two remarks. 

First, if the theory is true it is rather an 
odd fact that these physical forces reach their 
highest effectiveness when baptized with a 
moral and ideal name. No one denies that 
hunger is a driving force in the life of society. 
Men who are working for human rights may 
frankly say that they are trying to get more 
bread for hungry mouths. But before the 
agitation is complete the movement takes on 
the form of a moral appeal. The cynic may 
say that all this is hypocrisy, but, neverthe- 
less, lifting the appeal to the moral realm 
gives it added power. But even this is some- 
what aside from the present purpose ; we shall 
return to it later. 

We pass now to a second remark, namely, 
that we are not especially concerned with the 

90 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

order in which ideals emerge in the conscious- 
ness of men. It may be that the economic im- 
pulse comes first and the moral impulse arises 
as an afterthought. We are not thinking 
especially of before and after. It may be that 
men do not see the full significance of moral 
ideals until economic issues have been settled. 
To use the common expression, as long as 
there is money in a particular course the 
moral aspect may not have a chance to reveal 
itself. This economic view, with all its truth, 
is in these days much overemphasized, but, we 
repeat, we are not especially concerned with 
the sequence in which ideals emerge. The fact 
is that the ideals do emerge, and that they 
seem to us to make for faith. There is con- 
stant need of care against that old fallacy that 
we can judge the worth of an idea wholly by 
noticing the circumstances of its origin. 
Holders of evolutionary theory often fancy 
that they can get at the worth of an idea by 
determining its place in the evolutionary pro- 
cession. The main feature of a human ideal 
is not so much the path by which it has come 
as the direction in which it points. The ideal 
may arise from the earth, but if it arises to- 
ward God it is worth our study. 

Perhaps the best start for our general pur- 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

pose can be found in some illustrations from 
American history. It will be understood that 
there is no attempt here to trace a movement 
through history as a technically trained his- 
torical student would trace such a movement. 
We are, of course, dependent upon others for 
the facts here presented. All that we claim is 
that the facts point in the direction of an en- 
larging human ideal, and that they tend to in- 
crease our respect for men and humanity. 

As a first illustration of a movement which 
would tend to increase our respect for hu- 
manity, and especially for democracy, we take 
the period of the American Civil War and the 
years which immediately followed the con- 
flict. We can imagine the gasp of astonish- 
ment with which some will greet the proposal 
to show from democracy's conduct in war a 
reason for faith in humanity and for respect 
for humanity. We trust that we shall not be 
supposed to suggest that there is anything 
ennobling or refining in war. It is just be- 
cause w^ar in itself is hideous that we use the 
illustration. It may increase our trust in de- 
mocracy to see how it carries itself in seasons 
of grievous trial. We submit democracy to 
the test of severest conditions. It had long 
been said before the Civil War that the test 

92 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

of democracy would come in time of war. The 
fact that democracy stood the test well is an 
item to be set down to humanity's credit. Of 
course it will not be understood that we are 
committing so palpable an error as to identify 
humanity and democracy, but, surely, no 
greater promise for humanity could be found 
than to find a democracy of some twenty mil- 
lions of people acquitting itself with surpass- 
ing credit in time of strain. 

To begin at a plane which is decidedly 
lower than the moral aspects we hope later to 
discuss, discerning critics have said that even 
in its military aspects the conduct of the war 
was a great item to be set down to democracy's 
credit. Spenser Wilkinson, a foremost Eng- 
lish military authority, has used the American 
Civil War as an illustrative commentary on 
the remark of the great Prussian whose work 
on war did so much to make modern Germany 
possible, the remark of Clausewitz that when a 
whole people go to war, animated to the last 
man with a common purpose, the war, while it 
may be hesitating in its first policy, will 
finally take on as distinct and definite and 
true a form as if it were being conducted by a 
dictator — by a vast military genius with pro- 
fessional soldiers obedient to his will. The 

93 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

only difference will be that it may conceiva- 
bly require a longer time for a nation in arms 
to get itself into effective action than for 
the dictator. Spenser Wilkinson applies this 
remark, as we have said, to the Civil War. 
Taking the whole four years together, the war 
may be looked upon as one battle on a large 
scale. The history of the war thus becomes 
quite simple. It will not suffice to say that 
the North Avon by sheer weight of numbers. 
The weight of numbers had to be skillfully ap- 
plied. The North won by turning the left 
flank of the Confederacy as a whole. One 
blow struck the Confederacy in twain along 
the line of the Mississippi. Another broke it 
from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Then while 
the head and front of the Confederate resist- 
ance was held fast in the East, the Northern 
armies moved east to the sea from Atlanta 
and thence north, piercing the vitals of the 
Confederacy in all directions. The contention 
of Wilkinson is that this plan is as simple and 
direct and as effective as if conceived by the 
mind of a Napoleon. It will not avail against 
this contention to say that, after all, the work 
was done by professional generals. In the 
beginning it was true that the soldiers of the 
democracy thought that one man was as likely 

94 



k 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

to be a good captain as another man, 
and sought to fill official positions by ballot. 
As the war progressed, however, all this 
changed and the conduct of the war passed 
into hands trained to war. But the people 
themselves were responsible for this change, 
and the generals, after all, acted only in re- 
sponse to a popular demand. Grant, the gen- 
eral who cared least for the pressure of public 
opinion, on more than one occasion refused to 
turn back because the people were looking for 
advance in a particular direction and would 
interpret any sort of a backward step as a 
defeat. The plan, as a whole, reflected the 
will of the people. If it be objected that in a 
war between contestants w^ho were practi- 
cally two peoples the Prussian theory would 
call for like unity and simplicity of plan on 
the other side, the answer must be that the 
other side was essentially on the defensive 
and had to adapt its plans to the plans of the 
offensive. 

Now, all this may seem rather far-fetched, 
but Wilkinson has this much on his side — 
that, on the whole, the progress of the North 
was a miracle of victory, and would seem to 
indicate that even in the intellectual insights 
required in a highly technical field a whole 

95 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

people, under the stress of a great crisis, can 
come to an understanding which in a single 
individual would be superlative genius and to 
a force of will which in an individual would 
be entirely titanic. The significance of figures 
like Lincoln and Grant is partly in this, that 
Lincoln on the political side and Grant on the 
military side were incarnations of the good 
sense of the people. In the words of Lincoln 
the people heard their own thought and in the 
blows of Grant saw their own deeds. Neither 
was a man standing apart from his time. 
Each had his meaning in the democracy of 
which he was an expression and an agent. 

But great as is the credit to be given de- 
mocracy on the more intellectual side at the 
time of crisis, the credit to be given on the 
moral side is greater still. Bad as is war in 
any case, this war was undertaken on both 
sides in the name of an ideal. We may say 
all we please about the pressure of economic 
forces and about the irreconcilable confiict be- 
tween two hostile industrial systems. We are 
willing to grant that the confiict was one be- 
tween corn and cotton as to which should be 
king, but that was not all of the meaning. On 
the one side was the broad appeal to human 
rights, and on the other the rights of certain 

96 



II 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

States to rule themselves. Each side claimed 
to be fighting for an ideal of human liberty. 
One side may have been wholly right and the 
other wholly wrong, or both sides may have 
been partly right and partly wrong, with one 
side more predominantly right than the other. 
The essential fact is that the underlying, over- 
powering motives did not come to full force 
until they had been given a moral statement. 
Now, it is simply out of the question to say 
that the masses on one side or the other were 
playing the part of hypocrites. Human ideals 
seemed to be at stake, and this gave the con- 
test its desperate fury. No matter what we 
may say about the conspiracies and insinceri- 
ties of leaders, it is impossible to maintain 
that the people on either side thought they 
were fighting for other than a moral ideal. 
The progress of time has shown that the ideals 
of humanity for which the North stood meant 
more for the race, that the right of the people 
to rule was more closely bound up with the 
cause of the Union, that the final platform of 
the Union was for the broader charter of hu- 
man rights. It may seem strange to us that 
any man could invoke the aid of God in try- 
ing to secure bread earned by the sweat of 
another man's brow, but we would do well to 

97 



O^HE INCREASE OF FAITH 

heed the statesman's word that in this we 
judge not that we be not judged. 

The war too was carried through in as hu- 
mane a fashion as possible. Atrocities com- 
mitted in prisons here and there, for which 
the scarcity of provisions and the desperate 
nature of the conflict itself furnished some ex- 
cuse, ought not to obscure our eyes to the truth 
that in spite of bloodshed beyond all parallel 
the warfare did not brutalize or vulgarize the 
mass of the soldiers. Outrages and rapacity 
there were in plenty, but when we reflect that 
with the war at its height a million of men 
were engaged on one side, the wonder is that 
barbarities were so few. When the conflict 
had ceased there was, indeed, some clamor for 
revenge, but the victor's hands were not 
stained with the blood of political prisoners. 
And when the armies were disbanded — wonder 
of wonders! — they went back quietly to the 
pursuits of peace. Now, we protest that we 
would not say one word in glorification of 
war, but the manner in which democracy went 
through this period of strain with so little of 
moral damage tends to increase our confi- 
dence in the loyalty of masses of men to high 
ideals. The period of reconstruction, horrible 
as it was, was amazingly brief for a period in 

98 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

the life of a nation, and was partly the out- 
come of a real, though partly doctrinaire, de- 
votion to a human ideal. The conceptions 
which philanthropists held of the freedman in 
those days seem very humorous to us as we 
look back, but the conceptions were a credit to 
the men who held them. Longfellow repre- 
sented the Negroes dream as carrying him back 
to Africa, where "once more a king he strode.^^ 
The poet evidently knew very little about the 
dreams of the actual slave, but the misconcep- 
tion was really a tribute to Longfellow. The 
Negro problem is hard enough for us after 
nearly fifty years of experiment. There is 
little excuse for harshness in criticism of the 
failures of the first experiments. The idealists 
of the day lacked knowledge in a realm where 
there were no precedents. And they had to 
cope with outrageous adventurers and with the 
national reaction after four years of tremen- 
dous emotional upheaval, a reaction showing 
itself in indifference on the part of many as to 
how the nation should discharge its responsi- 
bilities. But, on the whole, considering the 
lack of detailed and accurate data on the 
working of social institutions in untried 
hands, the wonder is that so little damage was 
done. The working of popular thought, 

99 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

through the whole period, tends to deepen our 
respect for the people's respect for humanity. 
Passing from a period which is to all prac- 
tical intents and purposes closed, to one in the 
midst of which we are now moving, we call 
attention to the significance for American so- 
ciety of the passing away of the American 
frontier. Professor Frederic J. Turner has 
written with profound instructiveness on this 
theme. He even sets a date to mark the time 
when the nation passed out of one stage and 
into another. This he finds to have been the 
year 1890, when, according to the census, it 
had become no longer possible, at least in any 
considerable part of the country, to secure 
land free from all cost except just the cost of 
appropriating it. To be sure, there are still 
many parts of the country where essentially 
frontier conditions prevail, but these are be- 
coming fewer and smaller. The situation is 
somewhat as if a continent-wide stream which 
was moving easily toward the West had at 
last reached a check and had come to a stand- 
still or to eddying currents. So far as the 
exceedingly difficult problems are concerned, 
the real frontiers of to-day are the cities. The 
movement to-day is toward the cities, and the 
new problems are city problems. 

100 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

Professor Turner thinks that the passing 
away of the frontier will bring in — indeed, has 
already brought in — a new type of democracy, 
a type in which social elements are bound to 
predominate more largely than in the individu- 
alistic type of the frontier. In the old days 
of the frontier a settler was not likely to live 
near enough to his neighbor to be disturbed 
by him; there was room enough to allow the 
most quarrelsome neighbors to get along with- 
out too frequent clash. If the neighbor be- 
came intolerable, it was possible for the ag- 
grieved or disturbed man to move on to other 
lands to be had for the taking. That day has 
long since gone. It is now nearer the fact to 
say that our problem is to get along with the 
neighbor whether we like him or not. At 
most, all we can hope for by change is a change 
of neighbors. The neighbor is bound to us 
henceforth. 

There is no denying that with the passing of 
the individualistic type of democrat we have 
lost much. There was a romance in the 
independence of the pioneer which is very de- 
lightful to read about. There was a resource- 
fulness, too, that never ceases to amaze us. 
There was an inner moral strength altogether 
surprising. But there was another side. The 

101 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

life was barren. In spite of the fact that some 
men can rejoice in solitude and can even be- 
come philosophers and poets in the solitude, 
life in the solitude is for most men barren. 
Pioneer conditions were frequently too hard 
to allow any real rest, and what spare time 
there w^as went to loafing and dozing. The 
pleasures of the frontier were often coarse and 
gross. There grew up a false sense of honor at 
times — a quickness for resenting insult that 
often left no chance for an explanation that 
might save a friendship and perhaps a life. 
Along with this went a development of a demo- 
cratic doctrine from w^hich we have not yet re- 
covered — that every man is as good as every 
other man in every particular. The Civil War 
did much to show the fallacy of this idea 
through the mistakes which came with the 
notion that one man is as good as another in 
the leading of troops, but the idea still per- 
sists. The fallacy was partly responsible for 
the ^^spoils system'^ which appropriately 
enough was made potent by that king of 
frontiersmen, Andrew Jackson. While we of 
to-day have seen little of the pioneer, many of 
the pioneer's ideas descend to us as a heritage 
not altogether blessed. The worst legacy is 
just the idea that democracy is not an organi- 

102 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

zation but an assembly of units, each of which 
is what it is on its own account, and each of 
which maintains that it can do as it pleases. 
The fact that at one time such a conception 
was useful, and even indispensable, should not 
prevent our seeing the limitations of the con- 
ception for a later time. 

The conception which we are fast approach- 
ing is the conception of democracy as an or- 
ganism. Of course this doctrine is as old as 
political theorizing itself, but it is to-day re- 
ceiving a setting forth on a scale the like of 
which the world has not before known. We 
have to adjust our life to that of our neigh- 
bors. Now, the latter type of democracy 
makes possible evils which cannot be found 
with the individualistic type, but the likelier 
possibility is that the ideal of human life will 
be enriched with the realization of democracy 
as an organism. In the next lecture we shall 
attempt some analysis of the content of the 
ethical ideal to which men are advancing in 
the present-day emphasis on social values. 
Here it will suffice to say that the ideal is, or 
at least can be, richer and fuller under the 
new conditions. Two persons living and 
working together can think of more things 
than either can alone, and the things are more 

103 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

apt to be good things than evil things. When 
numbers of persons move on into evil together 
the outcome is indeed apt to be more tragic 
than when they move as individuals. Groups 
of evildoers may occasionally debase the hu- 
man ideal worse than individuals following 
out their desires as individuals, but the groups 
are apt to be held back by some considerations 
of morality and sanity which may not weigh 
with an individual. In a healthy community 
the streams of life which reach down even to 
the least part of the organism are apt to be 
healthier than the private circulatory system 
of an individual. If we must believe that the 
normal life is the social life, it must follow 
that the ideals which come out of the social 
life are healthier than those which come out 
of the individualistic order. There is some- 
times safety in numbers for human ideals. 

It may be objected that the great moral and 
religious insights have always started with 
some individual who has withdrawn from the 
life of the community and has brooded in 
solitude and silence until a revelation has 
burst upon him. Abraham leaves the city for 
the desert and John the Baptist grows up in 
the wilderness. But Abraham, according to 
the story, was seeking a city, and John finally 

104 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

drew to himself all Jerusalem and Judaea. 
Before a prophet becomes a positive force he 
must voice an insight or a need which the 
people have at least half felt or half seen. 
From what has been said in a previous ad- 
dress it will be remembered that we do not 
minimize the individual. The moral person 
is an end in himself, the only end we recog- 
nize. When we speak of the social organism 
we do not delude ourselves with the fancy that 
our language is scientifically exact, any more 
than the language is scientific in exactness 
when we speak of the individualistic theory as 
atomistic. Both terms are descriptive only in 
a figurative sense. The figure of society as 
an organism is true enough for our present 
purpose. The expression ^^social conscious- 
ness'^ does not mean that there is a conscious- 
ness apart from the consciousness of indivi- 
duals. We are uttering only commonplace in 
saying that society is nothing apart from the 
individuals that compose it, and we are will- 
ing to declare that the great result of the 
social activities is in the benefit of the in- 
dividual, but we insist that the individual 
comes to the largest life when he is so 
closely connected with others that he may 
be spoken of as a part of a social organ- 

105 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

ism. The fact, however, must not be lost sight 
of that while in a biological organism the 
parts exist predominantly for the good of the 
whole, in a social organism the worthy func- 
tion of the whole is the good of the parts. It 
is with this understanding that we speak of 
the social organism. 

The transition from the individualistic to 
the more social form of democracy is deter- 
minative of our social problems and of the 
restless agitation that so generally prevails. 
If it be maintained that present-day agita- 
tion is world-wide, and that the difficulties 
come through the introduction into America 
of social ideals from Europe, the ready answer 
is that American conditions have begun to 
approach European conditions closely enough 
to make plausible the suggestion that Euro- 
pean ideas should be adopted here. Nobody 
can foresee the outcome of the present-day 
movements toward emphasis on social values 
and social control, but some general forces 
make for the atmosphere in which faith 
flourishes. 

First among these forces which aid faith 
we mention the demand for Publicity. Under- 
neath this demand is the assumption, none the 
less real because half-conscious or uncon- 

106 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

scious, that the people can understand and 
that they have a right to know. In the light 
of publicity faith is apt to flourish. We real- 
ize that the modern democratic movement 
drags out into the light many things that 
would better be kept hidden, things trivial or 
harmful, but every year shows improvement. 
In the main, the modern democratic tendency 
is increasing the importance of that principle 
of discussion which Walter Bagehot found so 
significant for the advance of civilization. 
Though there are aspects of faith which are 
not best dealt with in public debate — and of 
these we shall speak in a later lecture — the 
broad foundations of the faith are served by 
the freest discussion. In the realm of faith 
much may happen in the secret depths of the 
soul, but faith does not thrive best when con- 
fined in a corner. The worst impression to 
give people concerning faith is that faith is a 
sort of secret for the initiated few. Let there 
be the fullest discussion. Let any man w^ho 
has any theory about the Church or the Bible 
or religious experience feel free to publish. 
Nothing so quickly kills error as free discus- 
sion, and nothing so firmly establishes truth. 
The quickest way to deal with some forms of 
skepticism is to bring them to utterance. 

107 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

Some doctrines are so fragile that they break 
with the very attempt to give them articulate 
statement. Some are seen through as soon as 
they are expressed. 

If we may indulge in what seems like a 
digression, we may call attention to the faith 
in the people manifested in the publication 
of the Bible in English three hundred years 
ago. It would be hard to find a parallel for 
this event as a revelation of sheer confidence 
in and reliance upon the mind of the masses 
as well as upon the content of the Book itself. 
When we consider the illiteracy of the people 
of the time, their natural proneness to mistake 
the letter of a revelation for its spirit, the pos- 
sibility of misunderstanding through the na- 
ture of the Book, we can only wonder at the 
boldness which could scatter the precious seed 
of the gospel on such a field. The result was 
not due merely to the particular type of people 
for whom the translation was made. The re- 
sult has been similar with all sorts and con- 
ditions of men and communities and races 
whenever a like venture has been made. 
It is worth while to trust religious reve- 
lations to the people. There may for a season 
be misunderstanding and turmoil and ship- 
wreck, but in the end the result is favor- 

108 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

able to faith. One test of the worth of 
a new religious doctrine, or method of 
study, or form of organization is to get it 
before the people for discussion. Light de- 
stroys some growths and quickens others. 
Modern discussion is light for faith — not the 
blaze of noonday, indeed, but light enough to 
reveal what is adapted to minister to the deep 
human needs and to set on high the great hu- 
man ideals. The moral factor is by no means 
slight in the modern popular demand for 
publicity. 

A second great demand coming out of the 
democratic impulse is the demand for Sim- 
plicity — simplicity in action and expression. 
The people are much too busy to give them- 
selves over to elaborate intricacies. The de- 
mand on institutions of all sorts is that the 
truth for which the institution stands be 
brought at last to such simplicity that it can 
be grasped for popular use. Of course this 
demand may run into absurdity. Justice 
Charles E. Hughes has called attention to the 
danger for democracy in democratic impa- 
tience with expert opinion. But the impa- 
tience becomes less year by year, partly be- 
cause the experts themselves show more skill 
in reducing their revelations, at least in the 

109 



O^HE INCREASE OF FAITH 

practical phases, to simplicity. For example, 
the fight of the modern scientist against the 
world-old plague of cholera is based upon the 
knowledge obtained from minutely technical 
processes. Cultures and staining agents and 
microscopes and the whole modern bacte- 
riological theory and technique are necessary 
for the immense victory of our day. But the 
final message to the people in danger of the 
plague is quite simple. It is, for the most 
part, just an exhortation that they keep clean, 
eat only cooked food, and boil the drinking 
water. It would be interesting to reflect upon 
the good wrought for the formulation and 
perhaps even for the advance of scientific doc- 
trines by the need of meeting the popular de- 
mand that the practical statement of the truth 
be simple. 

There is a manifestation of this same desire 
too in the current call for more direct methods 
of government or for a more direct instrument 
for the governmental expression of the popular 
will. How far some of these demands can 
safely be heeded is a problem for the expert 
in political institutions. Representative gov- 
ernment would seem to have behind it a long 
historic development suggesting its estab- 
lished usefulness as an instrument of de- 

110 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

mocracy. How far this system can be modified 
in favor of more direct government by the peo- 
ple is, indeed, a serious question. It is not 
difficult, however, to discern the moral spring 
back of the demand for direct government. 
There is always a possibility of evils creeping 
in when the path is too tortuous. When we 
must be too long in learning how legislation is 
achieved we are apt to become suspicious, just 
as we feel a tendency to suspicion when it 
takes a money-maker too long to tell us how 
he makes his money. A like demand for sim- 
plicity is seen in the popular protest against 
legal and judicial procedure. We all know 
the value of some set of checks in public move- 
ment. Public sentiment sometimes runs into 
a fever, and the courts serve the people by 
acting as a cooling and steadying factor. But 
the protest against courts is not so much 
against a system of brakes in a democracy as 
against the intricacy and lack of simplicity in 
procedures. When mere processes and de- 
cisions become overtechnical there is fear on 
the part of the people that mischief lieth at 
the door. 

Now, all of this movement toward sim- 
plicity is both an indirect and a direct aid to 
faith. Just as faith thrives on the demand for 

111 



THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 

publicity, so it thrives also on a demand for 
simplicity. The demand for simplicity enables 
the believer to put the nonessentials to one 
side and to fasten his thoughts upon the fac- 
tors supremely worth while. The people 
quickly weary of the too elaborate in religious 
doctrine and ritual and organization. It is 
well for faith that this is so. Faith thrives on 
the demand for the simple. The higher and 
more important the truth, the easier to state 
that truth simply. 

The third demand is that which we have 
already mentioned so often, the increased note 
of emphasis on Humanity in modern demo- 
cratic movements. No doubt this emphasis 
has its economic side. The movement away 
from the individualism of the frontier has its 
economic phase. The drawing force in the life 
of the pioneer was free land. The exhaustion 
of the free lands would inevitably call for 
profound economic readjustment. But what- 
ever the cause which has worked for the bring- 
ing of people into closer relationship, the very 
fact that they are thrown thus together makes 
for a larger mutual understanding. While the 
economic movement is exceedingly important 
in itself, it often best shows its importance by 
accentuating the emphasis on humanity as a 

112 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

standard and test of institutions. Increasing 
stress is put on the question as to what kind 
of men are produced by the institutions of to- 
day. No institution escapes the searching in- 
quiry. Even the Church must not be looked 
upon as an end in itself. No claims for divine 
authority will long support the Church if it 
does not generate right influences for the up- 
building of men. What kind of man is pro- 
duced by the Church, or the ideal, or the social 
institution? This is the critical inquiry. 

The transition from individualistic to social 
democracy is marked by the changing man- 
ners of democracy in the bearing of men to- 
ward one another. Elijah Pogram, of Dick- 
ens's Martin Chuzzlewit, may have been and 
perhaps was a caricature, but the sting 
of the caricature was in its truth. Part 
of the swagger had passed out of American 
manners fifty years ago, but somewhat of an 
overbearing spirit lingered on till later. The 
very fact that men have to be in closer mutual 
contact than formerly makes for larger mu- 
tual consideration. And in the deeper sense 
the accent on the most truly human ideals 
marks the spirit of to-day. Men seem quite 
willing to endure inequality of distribution of 
wealth. That inequality always has been, and 

113 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

quite likely always will be, though contrasts 
may become less glaring. But resentment 
against any show of arrogance on the part of 
the owner of wealth is abundant. Even vul- 
garity of display is keenly resented. 

When we reach the more directly indus- 
trial problem of our day we find the same 
emphasis on the demands of humanity. The 
growth of huge business combinations is an 
illustration of the form in which the mon- 
archical principle persists in democratic sur- 
roundings. No kingly leadership has ever 
been more striking than the leadership of 
some who have made themselves the heads of 
vast industrial concerns. Democracy has 
much to gain from conserving the monarchical 
principle, at least in the sense of furnishing 
scope for kingly abilities, but must stand 
against any tendencies of the monarchical 
principle in modern industrialism to inter- 
fere with popular welfare. A great deal of 
useful discussion has gone^ on in recent years 
showing the violations of law by which some 
industrial kings came to their power. Evil 
doings there have no doubt been, but it will 
tend to a more complete understanding to say 
that when these great movements of concen- 
tration and consolidation began the social con- 

114 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

sequences had not been thought out or worked 
out. Now that the social consequences have 
become apparent, the worthy aim is that the 
consequences be such as to be in the full sense 
harmonious with the demands of humanity re- 
gardless of the effect on the industrial institu- 
tions as institutions. 

In all the more radical movements of social 
reform the same stress on human rights gives 
the movements their power. If we regard 
these movements as dangerous in their ten- 
dency, it will not suffice for us to point out 
the inadequacies of their logic. The inade- 
quacy of the logic may make the doctrines 
dangerous, but what gives the power is the 
emphasis upon certain human needs. Kevolu- 
tionary and extreme socialism, for example, 
may be very dangerous to the community, but 
the wise man will not think he has done his 
whole duty in pointing out the danger. This 
is as if a man should call out that a car dash- 
ing along a particular road will plunge over a 
precipice. What we need is not merely to 
know whither the logic leads but to under- 
stand how to control the power which drives 
the theory. We may, if we so choose, call all 
these theories philosophies of failure, but fail- 
ure itself is so much a tragedy for human life 

115 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

that there is a protest against failure. We 
call for the most searching inquiry into the 
cause of failure, to determine whether such 
a large percentage of disaster is necessary. 
One significant feature of modern social pro- 
test is that it has arisen, in this country at 
least, in a period of comparative prosperity. 
Outside of the mere cost of living, which 
though serious is not necessarily calamitous, 
the times during which the current protest has 
come to power have not been crises of indus- 
trial depression. The facts which have called 
forth the protests have been just the facts 
which could be found at times which are called 
prosperous. And the protests have come not 
wholly from the men who have been them- 
selves under the burden of oppression. The 
recruits for revolution have come from all 
classes and especially from those who have had 
ample opportunity to study the structure of 
society. The spectacle of the mass of human 
failure has got not only on the nerves but on 
the consciences of many who are not them- 
selves failures. And the revolutionary the- 
ories, dangerous as we may think them, are 
red lights showing the disasters into which we 
may come if the underlying humanities are not 
heeded. The humanities have the right of way. 

116 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

It requires hardly more than a glance to 
detect the presence of the human ideal as the 
criterion of social institutions. Of course the 
evil-hearted are with us always, as are also 
those who delight to tinker with social machin- 
ery, and as are also those who have the itch for 
the new. But after we have made allowance 
for all these, the criticism which gets a hearing 
with the people is that which has behind it a 
genuinely human motive. To take a single 
instance, note the growing impatience with 
that protest against the education of women 
and the opening of the doors of economic op- 
portunity to women which gravely informs 
us that the true sphere of women is the home 
and that women were intended to be wives 
and mothers! As if educated women could 
not be as good wives and mothers as the un- 
educated. The more the doors are opened to 
Avomen in the field of economic opportunity, 
the fewer the marriages likely to come from 
motives predominantly economic. If a woman 
is not to marry, we ought to rejoice in the con- 
ditions which to-day fill the single life with 
increasing opportunity for culture and service. 
If a woman is to marry, the increased oppor- 
tunities outside of married life make it pos- 
sible for marriage to be more and more a free 

117 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

choice. The ideal human elements come more 
largely into play and the compulsory elements 
drop into the secondary place. 

It remains to speak briefly of the extent to 
which the strictly human ideals are playing 
their part in international relationship. Here, 
again, we would not at all minimize the sig- 
nificance of the economic forces. Interna- 
tional commercial considerations were never 
more effective than to-day in bringing the ends 
of the earth together, but when once the ends 
have been brought together considerations 
other than the economic begin to rise into first 
place. We may be permitted to mention three 
phases of international activity as showing 
the increasing emphasis by the people on hu- 
man considerations : the immigration question 
in our own country, the problem of the Chris- 
tianization of non-Christian nations, the in- 
ternational movement against war. 

In immigration the effective force against 
legislative restriction has always been the 
thought of America as the refuge of the op- 
pressed. America has been thought to spell 
opportunity, and the effective obstacle against 
restriction has been a lofty ideal. But of late 
years we have come to see that the motive of 
desire for relief from civil or religious oppres- 

118 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

sion is not so effective in bringing the aliens 
to us as we had once imagined. The fact that 
there are worthy political or religious refu- 
gees does not blind our eyes to the fact that 
the motive with the masses of immigrants to- 
day is economic. Of course an economic op- 
portunity is a moral boon to men, and even 
when men sought America for political and re- 
ligious freedom they were not unmindful of 
the material chances here. But the class of 
men now responding to the lure of America is 
not the same as in other days. A great mass 
come to us who tend to lower the standard of 
living for American workmen. The ^'stand- 
ard of living'^ means much to us. It means 
more than difference between the grade of fish 
and meat and vegetables consumed by native 
Americans and that consumed by laborers 
from abroad. It is said that carp from the 
Illinois Eiver are shipped in immense num- 
bers to the immigrants in New York, but that 
the American laborer will not touch such 
coarse food. The difference in standard, how- 
ever, is not to be measured by a difference of 
attitude toward carp. The standard of living 
means almost anything and everything for the 
outlook on life. It means that there shall or 
shall not be books and pictures and schooling 

119 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

and recreation and the opportunities for the 
fullness of life. 

We insist that it is its essentially human 
aspect which gives the immigration question 
seriousness in the minds of all thinking Ameri- 
cans. The spectacle of thousands of men 
brought from abroad to work in the mills is 
in itself bad enough, but the spectacle becomes 
worse when we stop to think that these force 
others who desire higher standards of living 
to accept a paltry wage. In the face of this 
outcome there are investigators who would 
restrict immigration very rigidly. If the 
argument is put to such students that they 
would force human beings, who now look to 
our country as the land of hope, back upon 
hopeless conditions in their own land, the re- 
ply is forthcoming that the very best way for 
America to serve the world is to maintain her 
ideals at every cost. If some immigrants who 
would with worthy motives come to us are 
kept out by any exclusion laws, this is, in- 
deed, a misfortune to those thus excluded and 
to us also, but this is an item of the cost which 
must be paid for the maintenance of human 
ideals. America cannot afford to cease to be 
an object lesson to the world as to what can 
be done when the right sort of civic and social 

120 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

ideals get a chance. It might well be that 
forcing immigrants back into their own lands 
and thus closing the vent from those lands 
outward toward our land would through the 
congestion and pressure in those lands work 
for reforms there. If there is oppressive hard- 
ship back of immigration, it might be that the 
restriction and confinement of the peoples to 
their home lands would blow the tops off some 
ancient evils. There are more students, of 
course, who think that the public schools and 
the standard of American life so promptly in- 
fluence, if not the newcomers themselves, at 
least the second generation of immigrants, 
that American ideals can be looked upon as 
safe. The point, however, upon which we in- 
sist is that there is growing impatience with 
any discussion of immigration which talks 
almost in impersonal terms of labor supply 
and ignores the effect on human ideals from 
the forced adoption of low standards of living. 
In the view of the world which comes with 
the modern outlook upon man a new respon- 
sibility falls on the Christian nations for hold- 
ing before the whole world the human ideals 
which make up the Christian thought of man. 
The existence of millions of human beings in 
so-called heathen lands under conditions which 

121 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

hardly permit human life from one point of 
view makes for pessimism. To frame a the- 
ory which will account for the hard plight of 
millions of men is beyond us. Truly the non- 
Christian nations sit in darkness, being bound 
in affliction and iron. But without attempt- 
ing to fathom the purposes of Providence in 
the history of nations, the truth seems to be 
increasingly manifest that the only power 
which will lift the heathen nations out of 
their plight is Christianity with that ideal of 
human life which is so essential to the Chris- 
tian system. 

Suppose we glance at a land like China. It 
is customary for a certain type of traveler to 
tell us that the fundamental trouble with 
China is economic, that the pressure of the 
large masses of population on the land is in- 
tense beyond calculation, that it is the pres- 
sure which has stripped the hillsides of trees, 
and that has exhausted the vitality of the peo- 
ple till, as Bagehot says, the nation has been 
caked over with a hard crust of custom which 
is imperviously obstinate. Now, we avow 
again that we do not underestimate the power 
of the economic forces, but we insist that 
economic and psychological factors act re- 
ciprocally upon one another and together upon 

122 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

the total situation. What is back of the fact 
of overpopulation in China? The demand for 
sons. What is back of the demand for men? 
The demand for earthly service to be rendered 
by sons to fathers after the fathers shall have 
passed on to the company of the ancestors. 
In other words, China thinks more of a dead 
man than of a live man. In any civilization 
at all Christian this earth belongs by right of 
eminent domain to the people now living. But 
in China a false religious view gives rise to a 
false relation between the land and the people. 
Polygamy, concubinage, and promiscuity in 
sexual relations are encouraged, with the re- 
sult that perhaps five generations are pro- 
duced in a length of time through which only 
four should be born. The strain on the soil 
becomes terrific. Nature falls back on those 
rough and merciless instruments which 
Malthus so effectively describes — famine, 
flood, and pestilence. The people hang on to 
existence by so flimsy a fringe that a crop 
failure means death to thousands. They 
crowd down into the river valleys so close to 
the embankments that a breach brings wide- 
spread disaster. They live so close together 
that the plague mows down its victims by en- 
tire communities. Nor must we allow our- 

123 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

selves to be misled by the fact that people 
living in such conditions develop a marvelous 
power of endurance. We must not accept it 
as a tribute to the people that they can live on 
next to nothing. Professor Ross has shown 
that a peculiarity of the Chinese is that they 
have demonstrated what a large part of the 
race can do under unfavorable conditions. 
This, however, is just a reason why the whole 
system should be changed. The race is not 
on the planet for the purpose of showing what 
can be done under unfavorable conditions. 
The conditions must be made favorable for 
the sake of the large human result which is 
to come. 

So that the justification, from the social 
standpoint, of the attempt to Christianize the 
non-Christian nations is in the large ideal of 
humanity w^hich is at the heart of Christianity. 
The aims of evangelism must be more than 
remedial. Suppose the resources of Western 
civilization are used to better the merely ma- 
terial situation in lands like China. It seems 
cold-blooded to say so, but these resources 
would only make the result worse, apart from 
the introduction of the Christian ideal which 
sets a higher value on human life. Polygamy, 
concubinage, and promiscuity must be done 

124 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

away. Life must be made more sacred. The 
birth rate must be lowered from animal to 
human proportions. This does not mean the 
Westernization of the Orient. It means the 
humanization and Christianization of the 
Orient. To say that such a chasm must al- 
ways yaw^n between the East and the West 
that an essential Christianity can never be 
introduced which will give the millions of peo- 
ple a chance at life on human terms is really 
to despair of the race. 

We mention briefly the crusade against in- 
ternational war as a closing illustration of 
emphasis on the claims of humanity. A great 
change has come over the thinking of the 
world in respect to wars in the last half-cen- 
tury. A war which should be frankly and 
openly commercial and materialistic would 
hardly be tolerated to-day. The economic ele- 
ment is, of course, a force in every war, but to 
put the appeal squarely down upon a business 
basis would condemn the war hopelessly. To- 
day the cost in human terms is being urged 
more and more. Important as might be the 
world-wide disturbance of capital through a 
war or number of wars, the disturbance to the 
happiness of the plain people who have to do 
the fighting and the suffering is more im- 

125 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

portant still. In this connection let us be 
thankful for those international labor move- 
ments which stand against war. It has always 
been necessary to consult the men who were 
to furnish the financial sinews before going to 
war. Let us rejoice that the human sinews 
more and more insist on being consulted. If 
there is to be war, let the men who are to do 
the dying be consulted before the war breaks 
out. 

But the telling factor against war is just 
its inhumanities. Of course there are inhu- 
manities of peace, and sometimes in a choice 
between inhumanities war must be chosen as 
less inhuman. But such crises are becoming 
less and less likely. The essential inhumanity 
of men's killing one another by wholesale is 
becoming more and more apparent. Note the 
impatience with which men meet the old plea 
that war must be relied on as a sort of moral 
tonic for the nations. The argument w^ould 
have us believe that we must resort to inhu- 
man means to make men human. 

We come to the end of this long and per- 
haps tedious discussion. The connection be- 
tween the working of the various forces at 
which we have looked and the increase of faith 
maj[, not have been immediately clear. We 

126 



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

must remember, however, that we are think- 
ing of life at its fullest and best, and that 
whatever makes for full and good life makes 
for faith. It does not require the detailed in- 
formation or the technical skill of the expert 
to detect the growing emphasis on human con- 
siderations in modern social movement, and 
this emphasis counts for faith. If it seems 
that all our stress has been on the thought of 
human values and none on divine values, we 
have to reply that the clearest insight we can 
get into divine life is through high human 
development. Believing in a system which 
teaches that man is made in the image of God, 
a system which places the incarnation at its 
center as its most essential article of faith, 
which depends upon a Bible which teaches 
social duty throughout, which builds a Church 
which aims at a redeemed humanity, we need 
not apologize for seeing in real humanness the 
sign of the coming of the kingdom of God. 
We are not now concerned with the progress of 
formal creeds. God is a Spirit, and they that 
worship him must worship him in spirit. If 
there is anything in modern life which re- 
veals a larger spirit toward men it is not too 
much to claim that that larger spirit has a 
divine source. 

127 



IV 

THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

There is a widespread feeling to-day that 
the past twentT-flve years have seen a marked 
advance in the moral spirit of Christian lands. 
In our own country especially it has been said 
that ethical change has been very pronounced, 
at some periods making strides ahead with 
a force which might almost be called the force 
of an ethical revivalism. We would do well 
to be on our guard against any such sweeping 
claims. Man for man and group for group, 
we may well ask ourselves if we are really any 
better than were our fathers. To use the old 
expression, if we are to be as good as our 
fathers, we must be better. We are under the 
obligation to increase with every possible de- 
velopment. Considering the forces that make 
for material and intellectual betterment, we 
have to ask ourselves if the moral forces which 
work in us and through us are keeping pace 
with these material anl intellectual forces. 
Are we making the advance in moral life in 
our time that our fathers made in theirs? 

128 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

This essay does not pretend to be a discus- 
sion in moral philosophy. It aims simply at 
showing the stress in general thought to-day 
upon some phases of ethical spirit which in- 
dicate progress. Especially does it aim at 
calling up the elements in our ethical thinking 
which seem to make for faith in religious be- 
liefs. 

It is cause for congratulation that there is 
at present both in philosophical and popular 
ethical thinking such substantial agreement 
on what constitutes the chief good. The chief 
good has been discussed ever since men began 
to discuss ethics, and the results have been 
confused and confusing. One school has 
found the chief good in pleasure, another in 
the pursuit of duty for its own sake, another 
in self-realization, another in self-renuncia- 
tion. The definitions of terms like ^^pleasure,'^ 
"duty,'' "realization," "renunciation'' have 
themselves been numerous and various. To- 
day, however, there is rather remarkable agree- 
ment that a vast deal of such discussion is 
barren and unfruitful. The term we hear 
most often in ethical discussion is "life." Our 
preceding essays have insisted that in modern 
philosophical and social theories the accent 
is put upon life as having an inherent right of 

129 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

way. But life is a broad and general term, 
and we must come down to "lives/^ The indi- 
vidual lives of men and women and children 
are the goods which stand in their own right 
and the chief good is these lives living out 
their highest and best possibilities. Of course 
when we use the term ^^highest and best'^ the 
debate begins to rage again, but it is some- 
thing to have discerned that the good in this 
world is that which is good for human lives, 
and not something which exists in and for 
itself in abstraction from the concrete lives 
around us. The good is a good life — not 
virtue for its own sake or happiness or any- 
thing abstract. A good man is an end in 
himself. 

Further, there is a fairly universal agree- 
ment to-day that the good man does not be- 
come a good man by just trying to be good. 
He does not become good by making goodness 
an object in itself or by pursuing an abstract 
righteousness. He does not reach the highest 
and best by thinking about himself. He, 
rather, finds life himself by trying to find 
life for others. The thought and purpose must 
be outward. A man's own righteousness is a 
sort of reflex or by-product which comes out 
of his attempt to help others. The social or- 

130 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

ganism is not a thing in itself, but it is a 
mighty instrument in helping the individuals 
who compose it to be good in themselves. The 
growth of what we call the social conscious- 
ness has helped us to this insight into the 
method by which life comes to us. 

Still further, we can be thankful for the 
fact that we hear such emphasis upon con- 
science as the very heart of moral life. Much 
popular teaching upon fundamental moral 
issues is off the track and some even seems 
perverted; but all, or almost all, teaching is in 
the name of conscience. Conscience is claimed 
for some queer, aberrant conduct, but it is at 
least significant that the word "conscience'' is 
in all quarters claimed as the vital and signifi- 
cant word. He would be a hardy ethical 
teacher who would arise and declare that men 
ought to disregard and flout behests of con- 
science. A teacher might well say that the 
uninstructed conscience, or the morbid con- 
science, or the popular conscience, or the con- 
ventional conscience ought to be disregarded^^ 
but he would hardly dare teach that a man 
ought to turn deliberately against his own 
mature thought of what is right. Conscience 
is, indeed, used in most unconscientious ways, 
but we can hardly think that a moral school 

131 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

teaching the open disregard of conscience 
would win many converts. 

As we look at some present-day demands 
upon that inner spirit which is the heart of 
the moral life we repeat that we are not espe- 
cially concerned as to how these demands 
have come about. We certainly do not think 
that in all cases the new sense of obligation 
springs up within the heart of the obligated 
man of its own movement. In one man the 
assumption of obligation may thus mark the 
spontaneous development of the moral life. 
In another man the obligation may be more 
like a demand from without or a law imposed 
by an external authority. But the new sense 
of obligation is in somebody's mind, and the 
somebodies are numerous, numerous enough 
to give the public moral spirit of our day a 
well-defined stamp. Whether individuals ac- 
cept these obligations willingly or unwillingly, 
the obligations are here. They are here as the 
expression of real conscience and they voice 
real moral insight. 

We begin by calling attention to the vigor- 
ous sense of the ohUgations of power to-day. 
A doctrine more and more generally accepted 
is that the possession of power imposes obli- 
gations on the possessor. We might in a sense 

132 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

call the struggle to get this doctrine into the 
popular consciousness a sort of continuation 
of the struggle against the divine right of 
kings. The slightest acquaintance with his- 
tory helps us to realize that the fight against 
the divine right came because of the unwill- 
ingness of rulers to admit that their power 
carried with it any real responsibility. The 
king felt at liberty to follow out any whim 
that might come into his mind. The succes- 
sive movements toward popular government 
have not come just because the people have 
been enamored of the dream of democracy. 
The movements have come because the people 
have felt that the kings have not ruled with 
a sense of responsibility. If the kings had 
ruled well, it is not likely that there would 
have been movements toward democracy so 
early in the course of history. There does not 
seem to be anything inherently repellent to 
the human mind in the thought of monarchy. 
Let the king take his work with a sense of re- 
sponsibility, and in some quarters even to-day 
the kingdom seems to stand fast. But the 
real question is as to whether any man can 
have a sense of obligation to his people strong 
enough to entitle him to a kingship. If a man 
is to be a king, his sense of obligation must 

133 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

be unspeakably strong. The very fact that 
the powers are in his hand puts obligation 
upon him beyond all possibility of estimate. 
Even in these days of limited monarchy the 
question, we repeat, is as to whether any man 
can adequately feel these obligations or dis- 
charge them if he does feel them. The objec- 
tion to kings in our day might be put into the 
form of a statement that the obligations are 
so heavy that we cannot think of asking any 
single human being to assume them. 

We get further illustration of the force of 
this same emphasis on the sense of obligation 
when we think of the responsibilities that a 
military leader would have to assume even in 
a democracy going to war. In a previous 
essay we spoke of the triumphs of our democ- 
racy in the strain of a terrible war, but such 
triumph means that sooner or later vast re- 
sponsibilities must be placed in the hands of 
individual generals. Of course when a pop- 
ular government votes for a war the underly- 
ing responsibility is with the voters, but the 
responsibilities on the generals are stupen- 
dous. Possibly the darkest single charge ever 
made against Napoleon was that which de- 
clared that he once ordered a perfectly useless 
assault just to satisfy the desire of a party of 

134 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

friends to see a little of actual war. Whether 
Napoleon was guilty or not we do not pretend 
to say. We can, however, understand the re- 
morselessness of the criticism of those who 
believe the charge to be true. Anything more 
cynically base than such an order would be 
hard to conceive. We can understand also 
the criticism passed on that other leader who 
was reported to have said that he was going 
forth to war with a light heart. Think of the 
obligations that the leader of hundreds of 
thousands of soldiers must assume! His 
slightest moves mean death to scores and per- 
haps to hundreds. One objection raised 
against kingship can likewise be raised 
against war. If a great war is to be success- 
ful, it must come into the hands of a single 
man. Unity of command is essential to suc- 
cess. But how rare must be the man who can 
feel the obligations of such leadership ! Here, 
again, the question is as to whether any such 
man could be found. In any case, modern 
thought has taken all the lightheartedness out 
of our attitude toward war. The great hero 
of war has to be the general and his heroism 
has to be the devotion to obligations so heavy 
that we may well ask if any man should be 
allowed to assume them. 

135 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

But the political power to-day has passed 
away from the kings to the citizens. We hear 
as never before the responsibility of the ordi- 
nary voter, for the vote means power and power 
carries with it obligation. Accordingly, we 
hear that more than a merely property or edu- 
cational test is necessary if a man is to be a 
good citizen. Of course the man who has 
property is apt to have achieved some 
moral strength in the gaining of the property, 
and the man who knows enough to read is 
likely to know more about moral distinctions 
than the illiterate man, but, after all, the 
urgent stress to-day is upon the need of the 
sense of obligation. We hear much about the 
man w^ho will sell his vote, but such men are, 
when the large number of voters are taken 
into account, very rare. Such men can be 
dealt with by the police and by the courts. 
The man whom we need to keep constantly be- 
fore us is the man who takes into his hand so 
mighty an instrument as the ballot and uses it 
without proper sense of obligation. We have 
had many good things to say of democracy, 
and our faith in the people is not small, but 
the danger in democracy is that power will be 
used without proper sense of obligation. We 
do not have to believe that there is any neces- 

136 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

sary and inherent right of the people to rule 
before we can regard ourselves as good demo- 
erats. We have only to believe that the people 
can rule better than can individuals to be 
democrats. We believe that the people can 
thus rule, but we may well be glad that we 
hear so often that rule by the people is only 
an experiment, after all. The people must 
rule with a sense of responsibility if they are 
to rule successfully. They must be willing to 
assume the obligations of power as well as 
the power itself. Among these obligations 
must always be included the duty of looking 
facts squarely in the face, of distrusting great 
outbursts of emotionalism, of standing for the 
doctrine that a thing is not settled until it is 
settled aright. In the midst of all present-day 
signs of restlessness which now and again seem 
to point toward revolution it is well for us to 
remember that, on the whole, the people seem 
to have a wholesome regard for the checks 
upon popular excitement. Very few popular 
assemblies will ignore the simpler and clearer 
rules of parliamentary procedure; very few 
will violate the requirements of fair play; very 
few will trample upon the rights of a minority. 
By the way, one of the clearest indications of 
^ healthy moral spirit in society is this re- 

137 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

spect for the rights of the minority. A mi- 
nority is even being looked upon as essential 
to the proper movement of a democracy. The 
old doctrine that government exists for the 
sake of whatever majority happens to win is 
about gone. There is even less emphasis than 
there once was on the doctrine of the greatest 
good to the greatest number. More and more 
we hear that the proper aim of government is 
the best, under the circumstances, for all. And 
this means an increasing sense of obligation 
on the part of the people. When the "ins'^ 
have their way they have only the advantage 
of certain strategic positions. The "outs'^ are 
not out in the sense that they are out of the 
game. Even when they are out they are an 
essential element. There is to-day a growing 
popular recognition of the truth that victory 
for a majority does not dispose of the minority 
which loses. The minority is not a foe which 
is to be annihilated or taken prisoner. The mi- 
nority is for the moment just the weaker of two 
forces which, working upon each other, bring 
about a certain resultant. Advances of popu- 
lar thought are seldom straight forward in a 
direct path. The advance of a majority can- 
not be stopped or turned back upon itself by 
the action of a minority, but it can be de- 

138 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

fleeted far to one side of the course which it 
might otherwise have taken. It is the recogni- 
tion of mutual duties by ^^ins'^ and "outs'^ 
which is one of the encouraging signs as we 
think of the immense power which the ballot 
puts in the hands of the voters. 

But, after all, the monarchical principle 
comes back upon us, even after we have given 
the vote to the individual citizen. The citizen 
to-day is, indeed, a ruler of mighty force, but 
the monarchical principle is illustrated on a 
vast scale in the industrial realm. We have 
to deal with real kings in the realm of industry 
— railroad kings, corn kings, corporation 
kings. It was once said of a railroad magnate 
that he had conquered more territory with a 
coupling pin than Julius Caesar had won with 
the sword. The days when these kings could 
act according to their own sweet will — a will 
which often proved bitter enough to those who 
stood in their way — are fast disappearing. So 
much power must necessarily be lodged in the 
hands of such leaders that the doctrine of the 
obligations of power are preached to them 
with urgent insistence. In the old days — days 
not so very far in the past — a railroad king 
could set up or pull down a community or a 
city with a stroke of his pen through a schedule 

139 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

of freight rates. He could divert the currents 
of trade from their accustomed channels. He 
could stop the mill wheels and literally make 
the grass grow in the streets of the cities. 
Without military resources he could really 
levy tribute from millions of people as truly 
as if he had started armies to marching to- 
ward them. He could rebate a city into deso- 
lation almost as effectively as a general could 
starve it by siege. Now, all this power is just 
as truly in the hands of the railroads to-day, 
but it will never be exercised as in the past. 
Laws will do their part, commissions will do 
their part, public opinion will do its part. We 
may be permitted to believe, however, that by 
no means the least effective force in bringing 
about the result has been and will be the grow- 
ing adoption of the doctrine that power means 
obligation, and that the power belongs only 
to those whose development in conscience has 
kept pace with their development in skill over 
materials and men. 

Even the possession of money — since money 
is power — brings with it responsibilities em- 
phasized to-day with new force. Money is a 
tool and must be used as a tool. Professor 
Carver has suggested that the meaning of the 
parable of Jesus about the talents is to be 

140 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

understood from the viewpoint of wealth as an 
instrument. If the talents were mere good 
things to be enjoyed, we can understand the 
protest when the talent was taken from the 
man who had only one talent and given to the 
man who had ten. If, however, the talents 
were to be regarded as instruments, there was 
only justice in taking the instrument from the 
hands of him who could not use it and giving 
it to him who could. Of course w^ealth is an 
end to a certain extent, but only to a certain 
extent. For the most part, it is an instru- 
ment to be used with a sense of obligation for 
the best things; and the best things, as we 
have tried to show, are human lives. There is 
a growing protest against a rich man's leaving 
money at his death to those who are apt to use 
it as an end in itself. Assuming that the prin- 
cipal of a great estate is to be kept intact, there 
is a growing objection to its being so disposed 
of by the legacy of its owner that the interest 
is to go to those who will enjoy money as an 
end in itself. Back of the objection is this 
realization of wealth as an instrument. The 
wealth is more likely to be used as an instru- 
ment in the hands of the trustees of a school 
or a hospital or an orphan ge than in the hands 
of those who are thinking of enjoyment. By a 

141 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

right as of eminent domain wealth belongs 
properly in the hands of those who can devote 
it to the most productive use. All this has 
been known from the beginning, but we are 
insisting to-day upon such definition of the ex- 
pression "productive use'' as shall include the 
highest and best welfare of the lives that the 
money touches either in the making or the 
spending. The tools of modern industrial life 
are so powerful for good or for evil that we 
must allow them to get only into the hands of 
men who will use them with a sense of obliga- 
tion. Industrial forces are set to work by the 
slightest pulls on triggers or levers. Con- 
scienceless fingers must not touch the triggers. 
This sense of obligation is going still further. 
There are some qualifications of men in the 
way of inborn talents which are really mo- 
nopoly powers. No one else has such talents — 
it may be — and the talents are not to be al- 
lowed to go to waste. Possibilities of influenc- 
ing one's fellow men, capabilities for unusual 
work, even artistic skill — all these are gifts 
which partake of the nature of monopolies. 
A monopoly even of this kind carries its obli- 
gations. There must be serious consideration 
of how the talent can be best developed and 
best used after it is developed. This too has 

142 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

been known from the beginning, but the obliga- 
tion is receiving new emphasis. The placing 
of the life is as important as the development. 
If we may use an expression from political 
economy, a man is under obligation not to 
work too much against the law of diminishing 
returns. "The law of diminishing returns'^ 
means that after a certain point the returns 
from effort are not commensurate with the 
effort put forth to obtain them. Then, if there 
are other fields where the same amount of 
effort will bring a larger return, the obliga- 
tion is to cultivate those fields. We are not 
at present directly concerned with missionary 
enterprises, but, for the sake of illustration, 
we may ask as to the wisdom of sending one 
hundred teachers into America when the one 
hundred can do but little more than ninety 
could ; the extra ten could accomplish as much 
in China just now as the ninety can here. We 
do not pretend to pick our figures with mathe- 
matical care, but the question is suggestive. 
Jesus once raised the issue as to the morality 
of refusing to place a candle where its light 
would do the most good. In our day we see 
the obligation of paying our way and of so 
placing our lives that they will pay the largest 
return. 

143 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

This modem spirit does away at once with 
the old heresy that a man's life is his own 
affair, and that he can make his choices as he 
pleases. More and more we see that the obli- 
gation to society reaches into the inner depths. 
If a man will not be conscientious even in 
those things which do not at first seem to 
affect the welfare of society, we speedily find 
ways of trying to establish a connection be- 
tween his conduct and the welfare of society. 
If a man could withdraw to some Robinson 
Crusoe island, making no drafts on society 
and living out of all communication with men, 
w^e might find something to say in justification 
of letting him go to the devil in his own style. 
But the ethical spirit of to-day will not hear 
of a man's going to the devil through indul- 
gence in vice with the plea that vice is a pri- 
vate affair. Opium-smoking is a distinctly 
private vice, but we have seen it nearly ruin a 
nation. The simple obligation to pay one^s 
way means more with the increase of moral 
understanding. Every man whose working 
efficiency is impaired below a certain point is 
a charge on other men. Such a man must be 
shouldered and carried, or some one else must 
pull his weight or pay his fare. In a world 
where struggle for life is hard enough at the 

144 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

easiest, moral sense rebels at the injustice 
wrought through the failure of individuals to 
play their part as men. Being a man means 
keeping off the shoulders of other men. And 
as to going to the devil in one's own way, even 
if all the expenses are paid by the one who 
thus goes, even if there is no loss to anyone but 
the man himself, and the man's going is a 
good riddance, still the spectacle of man's go- 
ing to the devil is not helpful, for long before 
he has gone from this world the devil is in 
such complete possession as to affect the on- 
lookers. The presence of evil in a human life 
is not socially profitable. Even when evil men 
can be pointed to as examples of the outwork- 
ing of moral law the exhibition costs more 
than it is worth. Social obligation reaches to 
the innermost realms of individual life. 

We have spoken of to-day's attitude toward 
the obligations of power. We may find further 
illustration of the same spirit in the emphasis 
on the obligations of knowledge. Knowledge 
itself is a power. 

We all know the obligation on the man who 
can see farther than his fellows or can grasp 
an ideal with firmer certainty than can his 
fellows. The emphasis upon the obligation of 
such a man to live up to the highest light is 

145 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

not new, but it is well for us to remember that 
the opportunities for heroism of this sort are 
as actual to-day as ever, though possibly less 
spectacular. The opportunities come in the 
minor social groups — industrial, political, 
ecclesiastical. The reason why the heroism 
does not attract great attention is to be found 
in the thought that if a man cannot get along 
comfortably in one of these groups, he can go 
out. There is plenty of room outside. But 
this is very easy to say. Here is a man who 
has trained himself to a particular task. He 
is known to hold and to advocate views which 
are not agreeable to the company for which 
he works. He is an ofl&cial of a transportation 
company, it may be, and a campaign is on 
against the saloon forces in a city through 
which this transportation company runs. The 
official receives a hint from headquarters that 
while he is free to vote as he pleases the com- 
pany does not expect its officials to take active 
part against the saloon. If the official speaks 
out after such a hint, he does so at more of a 
risk than that run by all the agitators in the 
town. The official is qualified to do a particu- 
lar kind of work. He may not be able to find 
work of just that kind anywhere else than in 
the employ of that particular company. Too 

146 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

much honor cannot be given under such cir- 
cumstances to the man of superior insight into 
the worth of an ideal who realizes and acts 
upon the obligations which the insight puts 
upon him. Or, to take a further illustration : 
here is a minister or a teacher enlisted in the 
ranks of one of the gTeat ecclesiastical de- 
nominations. He feels that he must advocate 
improvements in doctrinal statement or church 
polity. Some leader advises him that his place 
is outside. If the change which he advocates 
is subversive of the aims for which the de- 
nomination stands, or if it is hostile to the 
essential spirit of that body, the man's place is 
outside. But if the change is one called for by 
the development of the body itself, the obliga- 
tion is upon the servant of the Church to stay 
in and speak his mind. If he does stay he 
runs a risk. He may incur the disfavor of 
church leaders, either ecclesiastical or lay, and 
his own advancement may suffer. The most 
carefully guarded and moderate statement 
from such a man may mean more than the 
most radical utterances of the man outside or 
of the member of the professedly radical com- 
munions. We need liberal bodies of believers, 
but there is no reason for calling the liberal 
utterances of bands of liberals especially 

147 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

heroic. If a man cares to be heroic with radi- 
cals, let him preach conservatism to them. We 
mention these illustrations simply to bring 
out the truth that there is abundant oppor- 
tunity to assume to-day the obligations which 
go with the knowledge of high ideals. And 
we speak with knowledge of fact and not out 
of merely enthusiastic optimism when we say 
that in the industrial and ecclesiastical and 
political groups there appears to be increas- 
ing willingness to assume the obligations 
which go with knowledge of commanding 
ideals. 

But there is increasingly general recogni- 
tion also of the obligations imposed by the 
possession of more matter-of-fact and prosaic 
knowledge than the knowledge of high ideals. 
We have spoken elsewhere of the demands 
upon the possessor of scientific knowledge. 
Of course some treatment of the owner of 
great ideas to-day is little short of outrageous. 
Property in almost everything else is recog- 
nized and protected better than property in 
ideas. But even though this is lamentably 
true the scientific ideal is that beneficial facts 
become at discovery the property of humanity. 
If a scientist could discover some inevitably 
certain method of dealing directly with the 

148 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

germs of typhoid or tuberculosis, all right- 
thinking men would agree that such a dis- 
coverer should be suitably rewarded, but all 
scientists would recognize the duty of making 
the facts public property as soon as possible. 
There can be no question as to the obligation 
here. 

Moreover, society in general is taking upon 
itself more and more cheerfully the responsi- 
bility for the discharge of obligations which 
come with increasing knowledge. The use of 
the scientific method has revealed to us the 
laws by which even moral evils get their foot- 
hold in the world. We have come to a new 
conviction as to the remediableness of moral 
situations, but the remedies lie more and more 
in the field of prevention. The urgency with 
which preventive measures are pushed upon 
the public to-day and the increasing readiness 
with which the new view is accepted are mar- 
velous. There is nothing spectacular about a 
work of prevention. Here is a village in 
danger through the use of wells placed too 
near the dwelling houses. It may be that 
there never has been an epidemic of typhoid in 
that village. On the chance that there may be 
an epidemic the wells are abandoned and an 
expensive water system is installed. It is 

149 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

always possible for the reactionary to say that 
nothing would have happened if the old wells 
had been kept open. Now, in less material 
manifestations this new spirit is abroad in the 
land. There is more and more general re- 
sponse to the obligations which come with the 
very knowledge of the ways in which moral 
disorders may be prevented. The protests 
against the overcrowding of houses and the 
overstrain of weak wills and against all ma- 
terial and spiritual conditions which practi- 
cally rob the human will of its freedom are 
instances in point. Now that public opinion 
is aware of the causes of some evils, there is 
increasing restlessness in the continued ex- 
istence of the evils. The knowledge increases 
that sorrow which cannot be abated till the 
obligation which comes with the knowledge is 
satisfied. 

Under all this is the sense of obligation 
which arises from the knowledge that what 
might be called constitutional morality is 
woven into the very texture of the universe. 
That is to say, the laws which pick up the evil 
deed and carry it out to endless consequences 
are seen to be remorseless in their ongoings. 
There are laws which work for the relief of 
the evildoer who sets himself to work with 

150 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

them, but these laws never completely undo 
an evil deed. Bodies are scarred and souls are 
marked with the evil. Great achievements no 
doubt are possible to the life which has for- 
saken sin, but present-day moral insight will 
not tolerate the doctrine that the soul which 
has sinned can be as good as if it had never 
sinned. Modern morality is increasingly im- 
patient with any doctrine which obscures the 
deadliness of sin. The growing realization of 
this means increasing civilization. The po- 
litical economist tells us that civilization ad- 
vances as men "learn to discount the future 
at a low rate of interest'' — as they learn to 
put some far-off morrow on about the same 
plane as to-day. We are learning anew that 
though God may not always pay on Saturday, 
he nevertheless pays. There is no healthier 
moral realization than just this, especially 
when the obligation which comes with the 
realization is assumed. The laws do not slip 
and they do not forget. 

Lest, however, we may seem to have painted 
a system of unrelenting sternness, we call at- 
tention to the fact that the increasing knowl- 
edge of actual situations is bringing a chari- 
tableness into moral judgments which is of 
significance. In a sense, our knowledge of 

151 



THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 

men has increased. We see more clearly the 
springs of moral action. Irrevocable as are the 
laws of the universe, they are not to be con- 
ceived of as working in the same fashion upon 
the unintentional evildoer as upon the delib- 
erate transgressor. If the effects of evildoing 
were chiefly and primarily upon the body it 
would be true that an evil done in ignorance 
would receive the same penalty as wrong com- 
mitted intentionally. The laws of the body 
carry on the results of sincere mistakes and 
deliberate sins alike. We are not thinking 
especially, however, of the physical evils. 
These are the most easily remedied. We are 
thinking of sins of the spirit — rejections of 
the truth and choices of the evil. It is here 
that sin is most deadly. The mind which turns 
against the light loses its power to know the 
light. In this inner realm, however, we feel 
more and more the need of charity. We are 
learning that the moral task for the human 
life is to make the passage over from the 
merely natural to the spiritual, or, rather, to 
lift the natural up to the plane of the spiritual 
by informing it with a right purpose. And so 
we find many lives in many stages of transi- 
tion — some having attained quite nearly to 
sainthood and others making the first attempts 

152 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

a 

to rationalize and spiritualize their impulses. 
That deliberate choice of evil and cynical joy 
in evil are too common we all know, but the 
more closely we study human life the more 
clearly we see that much which seems like evil 
is not purposely and intentionally such. Per- 
fect intentions may mark even imperfect lives. 
And so the increasing contact with men to- 
day and the increasing knowledge of them 
puts on us the obligation to profound charity. 
Hence it comes about that the attitude toward 
the moral problem to-day has this double as- 
pect: insistence upon the inevitableness of 
penalty under the law and charitableness to- 
ward the vast mass of men who are striving to 
bring the moral spirit into their lives. The 
knowledge of the actual condition of men puts 
on us the obligation to charitableness. 

Not only are there obligations of power and 
of knowledge, but there are obligations of sym- 
pathy emphasized in the moral messages of to- 
day. Any man who can sympathize at all 
must feel himself in these days under the obli- 
gation to come into some sort of personal touch 
with persons who are in distress. Of course 
any man's range of personal contacts is lim- 
ited, but there is good cheer in any movement 
away from impersonalism. One of the almost 

153 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

inevitable vices of our time has been a sort of 
wholesaleism in the treatment of men. The 
wholesaleism perhaps took its start in indus- 
trial developments. The modern stress on 
large-scale production has tended to obscure 
the worth and meaning of the individual man. 
The tendency has been to get away from the 
thought of the individual laborer to the consid- 
eration of labor in the mass. In such a system 
a laborer is fortunate if he is known even by 
number. Out of the success of modern indus- 
trialism has come a copying of some of the 
features of industrialism in realms where they 
have no right. The demand has been that edu- 
cational and charitable and industrial ii;istitu- 
tions be handled with business methods. 
While any sensible person can see the advan- 
tages of business methods in any of these ac- 
tivities, there comes a point where business 
methods break down in dealing with the great 
human relationships. A philanthropic institu- 
tion may get on well enough in dealing by 
wholesale with the bodies of men, though there 
is some question even about this. The physi- 
cian at work upon an unconscious patient 
does not think of the individuality of the pa- 
tient, but as soon as consciousness returns, 
and the task of nursing begins, the limitations 

154 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

of wholesale and card-case methods become 
apparent. So likewise with educational and 
ecclesiastical wholesaleism. Business methods 
in these fields have revealed their weakness. 
And so in these later days there is a swing 
back in the other direction. The personal 
touch is emphasized. In the schools the 
classes are broken into small groups that the 
individual student may be reached. Personal 
contact is more and more preached in the 
work of the Church. It is high time for this 
change, for impersonalism tends to a sort of 
dehumanization. With the swing of the pen- 
dulum in the other direction the old virtues 
which come out of warm human sympathy 
come to the old-time regard. This makes for 
faith. The gospel deals in large terms, but 
not in wholesale terms. It lays stress upon 
sympathy. We are under obligations to help 
men with material things and with whatever 
knowledge may be at our disposal, but we are 
under obligations also to give of ourselves. 
While a moral command to -sympathize with 
men, given in a mechanical fashion, would 
miss the mark, the obligation is to take such 
attitude toward men that we shall sympathize 
with them. Hence the condemnation on the 
man who in giving to a cause simply flings his 

155 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

money into the box. More is called for — 
knowledge of the situation which demands re- 
lief, imagination, w^hich can make another^s 
suffering real to oneself. Much of the appeal 
to imagination to-day is forced and crude, but 
the appeal is made and with great effect. Life 
as we know it is inevitably an affair of the 
sensibility. There may be beings in some 
other sphere whose life moves on without rela- 
tion to sensibility. Life for them may be effec- 
tive will-exercise with no accompaniment of 
feeling whatever. Or it may be a colorless 
knowing without any sort of thrill in its ex- 
pectancy or discovery. Such is not life as we 
know it. For us a great word is happiness; 
and happiness has no meaning apart from sen- 
sibility. Now the higher the meaning put 
into happiness the more closely we come to the 
realm of personal communion. The greatest 
gift a man can give is real sympathy. Like- 
wise, the greatest gift a man can receive is a 
sympathy which shows that others are doing 
and thinking and feeling with him. The moral 
consciousness to-day recognizes and enforces 
this truth. 

We must say a word about another obliga- 
tion which is more and more forcing itself 
upon the moral consciousness. We refer to 

156 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

the extent to which the obligations of belief 
are coming into ethical consideration. There 
is in modern thinking a very decided trend 
away from the idea that religious belief is not 
a matter of grave moral consequence. We 
once heard much of the doctrine that it makes 
little difference to anyone else what any par- 
ticular man believes. Belief has so much to 
do with other-world destiny that if a man is 
willing to take the risks of the hereafter in 
any belief, the risk is entirely of the man's 
own concern. After that we heard of the 
doctrine that anyone should be allowed the 
liberty to believe whatever might agree with 
him. But this easy-going liberalism has not 
to-day the hold it once had. The emphasis on 
the social consequences of belief has made a 
difference. In some spheres society assumes 
a great deal of authority, not, indeed, as to 
what a man believes, but as to what he pub- 
lishes and puts into action. There are to-day 
various beliefs as to government, for example. 
Public opinion will not sit quietly by and 
allow beliefs subversive of all government to 
be proclaimed without protest. And when 
anarchy proceeds to act itself out into prac- 
tical expression the police take a hand in the 
argument. The plea of personal sincerity will 

157 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

not avail to establish a right to proclaim 
anarchy. While no one could ever justify him- 
self in an argument for a return to censorship 
of religious beliefs by authority, public opin- 
ion is recognizing that it makes a vast differ- 
ence to society as to what sort of religious be- 
liefs are proclaimed. It is being discovered 
that belief itself is apt to make for fuller life 
than skepticism, and that the larger beliefs 
make for the larger life. The better the belief 
the better the believer is apt to be. Moreover, 
there are distinct social consequences of par- 
ticular beliefs. Take the great catholic ut- 
terances of the creeds as to the nature of God 
and the dignity of human life. There may 
legitimately be all variety of interpretation of 
these utterances. The objectors may urge that 
the Church which has held to these doctrines 
many times has stood in the way of human 
progress, and may urge also that it has been 
hard to separate the truths from doubtful ac- 
companiments. But the large good sense of 
constantly increasing numbers is seeing that 
in the main and on the whole these fundamen- 
tal beliefs are mighty bulwarks of human 
order and progress. Hence it comes about 
that a skeptic or an atheist will support a 
church because it is good for the community, 

158 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

and that an agnostic like the late Goldwin 
Smith will, while avowing that it is disloyalty 
to the truth for a man like Cardinal Newman 
to declare assent to propositions because of 
the consequences of believing them, deplore 
the dawning of the day when disbelief in im- 
mortality will make the members of society 
struggle all the more bitterly for the things 
of the present. Now, it is hard to see how any 
man of intellectual integrity would not sooner 
know the truth no matter how unpleasant it 
might prove than to hold to a false belief just 
because of consequences pleasant for a time; 
but the confidence of the normal man in reason 
is such that he feels that in a realm where we 
cannot have positive demonstration one way 
or the other the fact that the social conse- 
quences of a belief are beneficial must be an 
indication that the belief lays hold of the 
springs of reality. And when once these so- 
cial consequences are seen streaming from be- 
lief as effects from a cause the social con- 
science of our time inclines charitably toward 
the belief. It is hard to see how a man who 
professes great sympathy for his fellow men, 
and who knows that those fellow men do not 
and cannot live by bread alone, can overlook 
the social importance of the catholic beliefs. 

159 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

It is hard to see how such a man, having once 
seen these consequences, can avoid the moral 
responsibility of at least examining the be- 
liefs, and examining them with charitable pre- 
suppositions. 

We may properly close this lecture with a 
brief suggestion as to the more direct bearing 
of the obligation to belief on the form which 
some Christian beliefs should take. First, we 
urge the duty of laying hold on the best be- 
liefs. We can have any beliefs we choose. We 
are not in the realm of strict demonstration. 
The question is not as to whether A or B can 
be proved by demonstration to be an objective 
fact, or whether the formal processes of rea- 
soning will yield a result thus or so. If there 
is in fact or reason nothing against belief, and 
the great needs of life call for belief, then be- 
lief becomes not only a demand of reason but 
a behest of duty. And with the field of belief 
open the obligation is to seek the best beliefs. 
One belief is not by any means necessarily as 
good as another. One belief is larger than 
another, or finer than another, or in closer 
touch with the facts of history or experience 
than another, or more in harmony with the 
total spiritual nature than another. If be- 
liefs are instruments for the upbuilding of the 

160 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

life, the wise man searches for the best instru- 
ment. The truth of belief is like the truth of 
an instrument; an instrument is true when it 
is made of the finest obtainable material, when 
the workmanship on it is honest and sincere, 
w^hen it comes nearest perfection in accom- 
plishing its proper work. Or, more clearly 
still, the truth of a belief is like what w^e might 
call the truth of a food. A food could be 
called true if it is really a product containing 
the great elements on which the body depends, 
and when it is so prepared as to nourish life. 
The body is a part of the physical universe. It 
thrives on the foods which most deeply con- 
nect it with the universe. The soul is a part 
of the spiritual universe. If it thrives on be- 
liefs, it must do so because these beliefs con- 
tain the elements out of which the spiritual 
universe is constituted. But there are foods 
and foods and beliefs and beliefs. Some foods 
and some beliefs are clearly more truly of the 
basic materials of the universe than are others 
and some are more wisely prepared than 
others. A moral imperative lies back of the 
search for the best beliefs. 

Furthermore, in the search for the best be- 
liefs the demands of the moral life are to be 
used as the guiding light. If we are to have 

161 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

beliefs, we must have the best beliefs, and by 
best beliefs we mean the morally best. It is in 
obedience to a sure moral insight that the his- 
tory of theology is a story of the progressive 
moralization of theology. As soon as men 
have attained to a fresh moral insight they 
have dared to attribute this to the Divine 
Being as a part of his character. They have 
believed that these insights are in a profound 
sense a part of the self-revelation of God to 
men. The story of the progress of moral think- 
ing is in any case interesting, but, as we have 
so often said, we are not especially concerned 
with the precise steps by which the insights 
come. If they come because growing material 
needs or advancing material prosperity make 
demand for a fuller thought of God, well and 
good, if only the insight stands in its own 
right after it does come. The guiding rule of 
religious thinking might well be phrased as an 
assumption that nothing is too good to believe 
about God. 

We must be careful as we follow out this 
leading of increasing moral insight lest we be- 
come uncharitable toward beliefs of an earlier 
day. It is easy for us to speak of ourselves 
as the people and to fancy that moral under- 
standing will die with us. We must remem- 

162 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

ber that a good man is a good man in whatever 
age he lives, that the central element in a 
moral character is a good will, and that the 
larger knowledge of ethical values comes out 
of following the dictates of good will toward 
the larger interpretations of increasing knowl- 
edge. There should never be any reflection on 
the ancient saints in our speech about growing 
moral insight. The problem is similar to that 
of our relation to the wise men of other times. 
We know more than Plato, but it would 
hardly be a mark of superior wisdom to say 
that we are wiser than Plato. We may know 
more truth than he knew, but we are not apt 
to be greater lovers of the truth than he. 
With this caution before us we pass to some 
consideration of the progressive moralization 
of the idea of God. 

Take, now, the thought of the increasing 
sense of obligation which obtains in our day 
and see how this is being applied to our con- 
ception of God. We have spoken of the obliga- 
tions of power. We are coming to emphasize 
the obligations which must be upon one who 
holds in his hands the forces of the universe. 
We preach the obligations of possession. The 
man who has control of the industrial forces 
of a time has vast obligations, but what are 

163 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

these obligations as compared to the obliga- 
tions of control of a world? We insist upon 
the obligations of leadership of armies or of 
States, but what are these responsibilities com- 
pared to the responsibilities of creatorship? 
Human beings are not in this world by their 
own choice. None of us had a vote on the ques- 
tion as to whether he would come or not.^ And 
when we awake to consciousness here we find 
ourselves in rather a diflScult plight. We are 
not creatures endowed with merely passive 
sensibilities, nor are we able outright to shape 
our destinies. We have, however, enough 
freedom to make shipwreck possible. We are 
confronted by the most grievous inequalities 
of fortune between persons and between dif- 
ferent periods of our own careers. And just 
about the moment we feel ourselves in position 
to accomplish something worth while we are 
called from earth. Say all we please about 
human responsibility, the divine responsibility 
is greater still. God must be looked upon, in 
the light of our increasing understanding of 
obligation, as the most obligated Being in the 
universe. If he has not the power to control 
for moral purposes the forces of the universe, 
he must stand condemned by moral reason for 
ever having undertaken such an enterprise as 

164 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

the universe. If he has the power, he must use 
it. The history of religious thinking shows 
that the moral insight of the race has always 
recognized this obligation, each age express- 
ing it in the language of its own time. Accord- 
ingly, the Almighty has been conceived of as 
discharging faithfully the obligations which 
are upon him through the possession of power. 
If men ever thought of the devil as robbed of 
his due by what God had done for men, they 
thought of God himself as discharging what- 
ever obligation was due the devil. If God was 
thought of as a feudal Lord whose dignity had 
been affronted beyond the power of mankind 
to make reparation, God himself must make 
reparation. If any sort of a substitute must 
pay a penalty for sin because of the inade- 
quacy of any offering which man might make, 
God must provide the substitute. If a tribute 
must be paid to the dignity of the government 
of the universe by some one worthier than 
man, the problem must be solved by God him- 
self. If moral influences are to be set at work 
for men by some force higher than the human, 
God must set the forces to work. It all comes 
down to this, in a word, that God is under 
obligation to exert every means in his power 
to help men use aright the boon of freedom 

165 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

which has been compulsorily bestowed upon 
them. 

Then there are the obligations of knowledge 
which we look upon as binding upon God. 
While we insist strenuously that there must 
be no abatement of the moral law, the increase 
of our moral insight leads us to larger charity 
in our attitude toward men. We do not min- 
imize the ill desert of the evil will, but the more 
we know of men the more we are inclined to 
charity. The dependence of choices upon en- 
vironmental conditions and upon hereditary 
tendencies and upon the physical condition, 
the limitations w^hich come with inadequate 
knowledge or deficient imagination — all these 
deter us from hasty judgment, especially as 
to the motives of men. Likewise we insist 
that the judgment of God must rest down 
upon full knowledge, that his attitude can 
never be determined by anything other than 
the full light. Hence we hold ourselves in 
readiness to see many earthly judgments re- 
vised and many verdicts set aside. The doc- 
trine that has in any other than a merely prac- 
tical sense put judgment in the hands of men 
is looked upon as little short of blasphemy. 
The final destiny of men is in the hands of 
the God who knows, and he must act out 

166 



i 



THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 

the responsibilities which come with knowl- 
edge. 

Finally, there must be upon God the obliga- 
tion to sympathy. If we are to cast ourselves 
with self-abandonment into the work of up- 
lifting men, much more must he. There 
is no room in the moral universe for a 
merely philanthropic God. God cannot be 
looked upon merely as a Benefactor. He 
must come to men himself. If he gives 
gifts, he must be in the gifts. If we are not to 
fall into the evil of impersonalism, he must 
not fall into that evil. He must not look at 
men as "masses,'^ or ^^humanity,'^ or "man- 
kind.'^ He must stand toward men in the re- 
lation of ^Tather'^ and "Friend.^^ He must 
be interested in men, not for what he is to get 
out of them, but for what they are in them- 
selves. If an obligation of this sort is upon 
us, it is much more upon God. He must fill 
human life to the full with his sympathy. 

It is from the standpoint of this manifold 
obligation that we must approach the moral 
basis of the incarnation. The glory of the doc- 
trine of the incarnation is that God has freely 
taken the burden of human life upon his own 
heart. But it does not detract from this glory 
to teach that this free gift of love bases down 

167 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

upon moral obligations. God has with love 
and with passionate enthusiasm come as 
deeply into men's lives as it is possible for him 
to come. He has discharged and does dis- 
charge with solemn joy the moral obligations 
of creatorship and fatherhood. He is the 
leader of all in self-sacrifice; this is the glory 
of the cross. We can easily lose ourselves in 
theological intricacies when we attempt the- 
ories of Christology and atonement, but we 
must not lose sight of the clear moral aim 
which the framers of the theories — in so far 
as they have met any widespread demand at 
all — ^have had at heart. They have been anx- 
ious to show that God is moral above all 
others, that, having placed heavy responsibili- 
ties upon men, he takes the heaviest responsi- 
bilities upon himself, that in Christ and the 
cross he has laid bare his inner thought to 
show men that in the realest and profoundest 
sense he is with men. 



168 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTEINE 

In the old days a wise Christian leader 
counseled his followers to adorn the doctrine 
of the Lord Jesus. Throughout the centuries 
there has been a real, though for the most part 
half-conscious, tendency to act out the impulse 
back of the apostle's advice. The aesthetic or 
artistic impulse has led to most notable crea- 
tions in the manifestation of religious spirit. 
We have only to instance the subjects of many 
of the world's greatest paintings and orations 
to prove this statement, and both church 
architecture and church ritual bear witness 
to the force of the same impulse. 

We are liable to grave misunderstanding 
when we speak of the significance of an in- 
crease of a discernment of right form or of a 
sense of beauty for religious insights. Still, 
the growth and improvement of what might be 
called the artistic impulse really make for 
the betterment of theological statement. To 
begin with a consideration which is not 
. 169 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

directly artistic, the progress of mechanical 
invention helps us to see the need of right 
form, not, indeed, for purposes of aesthetic 
gratification merely, but for the sake of in- 
creasing effectiveness. Quite often the curve 
of greatest beauty proves to be the curve of 
greatest strength. But even from the stand- 
point of effectiveness alone it is essential that 
an inventor work toward an effective form. 
The inventor may have before him two pieces 
of glass of precisely the same quality. One is 
plain glass and the other is the lens of a tele- 
scope. The lens is a lens simply because it has 
been given a certain form. Its curve has been 
fashioned with mathematical exactness. Prop- 
erly mounted and turned tovrard the sky, it 
will reveal to the observer something worth 
seeing. A recent book of three hundred pages 
describing inventors at work gives over half 
its space simply to this consideration — that 
the process of invention has to do not so much 
with an attempt at creating new materials, or 
even new combinations of materials, as with 
the change in the form of old and familiar ma- 
terials. 

As it is in the realm of material invention 
so is it also in the realm of literary invention. 
In fact, a production can hardly be called 

170: 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

literary until the material has been thrown 
into the right form. A scientist may make a 
great and far-reaching discovery, but his dis- 
covery does not become effective in shaping 
the thinking of the people until, as in the case 
of Darwin's Origin of Species, for example, it 
is stated with some degree of literary skill. In 
the realm of social investigation we have at 
our hand to-day masses of facts terrifically 
dynamic in their possible power to arouse 
public attention, or even to start revolution. 
But these facts lie in unshaped masses in gov- 
ernment reports, in papers read before learned 
societies, in articles published in technical 
journals. What is needed is the appearance of 
some artist who can shape the material into 
effective form. Now, the progress of theolog- 
ical thinking in our time is somewhat a 
progress in the shaping of material. We have 
not discovered much that is altogether new. 
We have, however, learned how to change em- 
phasis and how to omit altogether, and how to 
cast aside the nonessentials, and how to fash- 
ion the essentials toward a statement with a 
cutting edge. The call of the preacher espe- 
cially is not so much to be an original au- 
thority in scientific, or philosophic, or social, 
or even theological investigation. The au- 

171 



THE INCREASEJ OF FAITH 

thorities in these various spheres are more apt 
to be the men of the schools; but the men of 
the schools are not apt to be conspicuously suc- 
cessful as masters of effective popular state- 
ment. It remains for the preacher to take the 
masses of fresh material which are delivered 
to him almost daily and to shape these into 
effectiveness. To do this work as it ought to 
be done will quite likely be enough of a task 
for any man called to the pulpit. Intellectual 
ability shows itself not more in the discovery 
of truth than in the cogent and well-balanced 
statement of the truth. 

Lest we appear to lay too much stress on a 
phase of religious effort which may seem to 
have to do merely with the technic of the 
preacher's work, we hasten to call attention to 
the fact that the obligation here is not merelj 
professional and artistic but moral as well. 
We hear a vast deal to-day about the honesty 
of religious teachers. We are told of the obli- 
gation upon the religious teacher to be honest 
with himself. We urge again what we have 
said in a previous lecture about the need of the 
leader's being honest to his followers. To be 
honest to the follower implies a willingness to 
fashion and refashion a statement of truth till 
it cannot fail of a true effect. The material in 

172 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

the statement may be true: the form of the 
statement may be such as to produce only 
falsity in the impression. From this point of 
view it might fairly be said that some men 
whose utterances are always true in their 
matter are always untrue in their form. The 
insignificant truth is made untrue when it is 
treated with as much emphasis as the im- 
portant truth. Putting truths all on the same 
plane comes in the end to positive distortion. 
Yet the distortion may come not from pur- 
posive desire but from indifference to perspec- 
tive and proportion. Among the religious 
thinkers of an earlier generation there used 
to be considerable debate as to the conditions 
of salvation. There was much support of the 
doctrine that no man could be summarily cast 
out of the kingdom who had never heard Christ 
preached. This was obviously a provision in 
behalf of the heathen. As soon, however, as 
an expedient of this sort was resorted to in 
behalf of the heathen the question arose as to 
what others had not heard Christ preached. 
Some took the ground that even faithful at- 
tendants at churches had not heard Christ 
preached. We need not revive this ancient 
debate to see the force of such a contention. 
A religious teacher might draw a portrait of 

173 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

Christ in lines every one of which might be 
true. Yet the lines might be so put together 
— or so not put together — as to result in 
caricature rather than in portraiture. 

All this, however, may make theological 
statement seem more of an artificial creation 
than true statements are. Real revelations 
grow after the manner of organisms. The 
supreme beauty in this world is the beauty of 
a growing life. If the life within be full and 
free, the outward expression is apt to take on 
beauty of form to correspond. If the inner 
life is cramped or scantily nourished, the out- 
ward expression is distorted or deformed. 
The organs of a growing life make a twofold 
appeal to us — an appeal because of their effec- 
tiveness and an appeal because of their own 
inherent beauty. The erect body, for example, 
is stronger than the bent body. There is more 
chance to breathe, better distribution of the 
weight to be carried, an opportunity for the 
sight to range ahead and on both sides. The 
impoverished organism, on the other hand, 
has not strength enough to hold itself erect, 
and through this lack of strength it loses the 
chance to gain more strength. In a sense 
beauty may be said to belong to the very life 
of a growing religious organism. Beauty of 

174 



THE ADORNMENT OP DOCTRINE 

form is the natural expression of a living re- 
ligious insight. 

In the second place, the beauty of a state- 
ment — its correctness of form and its exact- 
ness of symmetry — makes an effective appeal 
on its own account. Quite apart from the fact 
that statements of truth can be put in effective 
form simply for the sake of effectiveness as 
statements, they should be given correct form 
for the sake of the appeal which the beauty 
itself makes. The masters of theological state- 
ment have always known how to put this 
impress of beauty upon their work. We some- 
times wonder how it has come about that sys- 
tems of philosophy have lasted beyond their 
day into times in which they are not altogether 
useful. We sometimes speak of succeeding 
generations as under the spell of systems of an 
earlier day. We speak more wisely than we 
realize. The spell is the spell cast by a genius 
for construction. The thinker has thrown his 
thought into form that makes it unescapably 
imposing. There is a unity about the system 
and a symmetry in its development which 
make men turn back to gaze. We can no more 
escape the charm of some of these systems 
than we can escape the charm of the Pyramids 
or the Parthenon. 

175 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

The recognition of this truth is ever before 
the higher order of religious prophet. He 
strives to adorn his doctrine. He knows, of 
course, that adornment is not something put 
on from without; it is the movement from 
within of a living principle. The prophet 
knows that when the principle comes to high- 
est expression it w^ill minister to the highest 
in men. We have said that present-day philos- 
ophy seems to be moving on the sound prin- 
ciple that in our quest for truth we are to 
follow the lead of the highest and best in our- 
selves. We may justly feel that the craving 
for the highest and best will not be satisfied 
until the truth which in itself seems highest 
and best has been joined to highest and best 
statement. 

Prominent among the factors which to-day 
are making for the adornment of doctrine is 
the growth of a sense of restraint. We share 
with others the alarm at the falling off in re- 
ligious activities. We do not feel alarm, how- 
ever, at the falling off of some forms of re- 
ligious expression. It is sometimes claimed 
that the religious spirit shows itself in an 
utter abandonment of the life of the believer 
to complete expression. This is true if by ex- 
pression we are thinking of deeds of self- 

176 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

sacrifice. Yet even here there are limitations 
imposed by the sense of the fitness of things. 
When we are thinking of religious expression 
as taking the form of literary statement we 
must give large part to the limitations im- 
posed by the fitness of things. 

There is to-day a growing sense of restraint 
which tends to magnify the importance of the 
normal and healthy in religious expression and 
to prevent overemphasis on the morbid and 
unhealthy. While there is truth in the claim 
that art should be followed for art's own sake, 
there is even deeper truth in the further claim 
that nothing can be truly artistic which does 
not have back of it a normal and healthy pur- 
pose. It would be very hard for even a gifted 
artist to make much of a subject which all the 
world knew to be sickly or diseased. Certain 
processes in nature are called morbid when 
considered in relation to their bearing on hu- 
man welfare. Certain dangerous growths, for 
example, take place in the human organism 
and in the end bring the organism to death. 
The actual processes of these growths, when 
viewed by the scientist, may move according 
to the same bacteriological or physiological 
laws as do the healthy processes. The micro- 
scopic forms produced may be just as beau- 

177 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

tiful in their tiny lines and as symmetrical 
in their proportions as the forms which make 
for health. If, however, an artist should try 
to give expression to what he might call the 
inherent beauty of a morbid growth, he would 
find himself in difficulty the moment he tried 
to secure an audience. Of course it may seem 
that judging the aesthetic quality of a fact in 
nature by its relation to human needs is arrant 
egotism, but the world thus judges, neverthe- 
less. If our contention be just in this illus- 
tration, much more must it be just in the realm 
of religious expression. The world will not 
finally tolerate emphasis upon the unnatural 
or the unhealthy in religious utterance. 

Discerning critics have more than once 
called attention to the element of restraint in 
the gospel narratives. Think for a moment of 
the story of the crucifixion as told by the evan- 
gelists. Here was every opportunity for mor- 
bid and harrowing treatment of ghastly de- 
tails, an opportunity which later ages did not 
fail to improve. In the gospel narratives the 
dreadful event is passed over as quickly as 
possible. Moreover, the few touches, swift as 
they are, set before us not the horrible aspects 
of the story but the spiritual significance. 
This part of the gospels, by the way, is but 

178 



THE ADOENMENT OF DOCTRINE 

little short of a literary miracle. The writers 
very likely knew nothing about Greek re- 
straint, but they had the spirit of restraint, 
nevertheless. The glory about the cross of 
Christ is a normal and healthy glory, the reve- 
lation of that spirit of love which is forever at 
the heart of things. The writers so brush 
away the dreadful as to leave the love of Christ 
streaming forth unmistakably. 

The movement away from the unhealthy 
must bring about better spiritual conditions 
both for society and for the individual. It is 
to these back-lying conditions that we must 
look as we think of the religious expression of 
a particular time. We can best see this im- 
provement by contrasting our own century 
with some earlier centuries. How much 
chance would monasticism, for example, have 
of taking root in our time? We would not 
disparage the good of monasticism. Many 
benefits came forth from the system which 
have been of lasting good to humanity. Quite 
likely we could date many productive prin- 
ciples of modern agriculturalism back to the 
gardens of the monks. It was — though of 
course in much later times — to Mendel the 
monk that the world owed the long series of 
experiments which resulted in the scientific 

179 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

formulation of the biological law of heredity. 
But advantages like this are largely incidental. 
We may at least say that in our day monasti- 
cism on a large scale would be looked upon as 
aberrant and unnatural. Here and there an 
individual who has taken the vows of celibacy, 
or who has even consecrated himself to the 
life of a hermit, may give utterance to loftiest 
religious expression; but, on the whole, cir- 
cumstances which lie apart from the main 
current of normal human life cannot be pro- 
ductive of best religious statement. 

As it is in the lives of communities so also is 
it in the life of the individual. It may cause 
almost a smile to say that our age has turned 
away from habits of spiritual introspection. 
This would seem to put the present-day con- 
dition very mildly. It may cause astonish- 
ment when a professedly religious teacher 
declares that there is danger in religious intro- 
spection. The danger does not seem to be 
especially imminent in our time. But while 
the movement away from introspection to-day 
may be just an expression of indifference, 
such a movement may rise from true religious 
instinct. The needs of the individual soul 
must certainly not be neglected. It is very 
easy, however, for the devout believer to carry 

180 



THE ADOENMENT OF DOCTRINE 

introspection to an unhealthy excess. The 
more devout the believer the greater the 
danger. Suppose a man should ask himself 
at the close of each day's religious effort 
whether during that day he had done all he 
could for the advance of the kingdom. Ordi- 
narily, this question is wholesome. It is very 
easy to see, however, that the question might 
be too frequently repeated. And too fre- 
quently repeated, the question might easily 
lead to morbidness. This danger is especially 
imminent when the mind is given to self- 
scrutiny as to its own sincerity, or as to the 
signs of the presence of the divine within it- 
self. Utterances born out of an unhealthy 
mental state violate that sense of fitness which 
should mark religious utterance. If we do 
not directly discourage the habit of overmuch 
religious introspection to-day, we at least favor 
reticence in speech about such introspection. 

The adornment of doctrine implies likewise 
a restraint from any degree of exaggeration. 
In a previous lecture we spoke of the increas- 
ing emphasis upon simplicity of statement. 
There we were emphasizing the need of sim- 
plicity in statements addressed to the under- 
standing of the vast masses of the people. It 
is in order in the present connection to insist 

181 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

that simplicity of statement must characterize 
religious utterance if that utterance is to min- 
ister to the finest feelings of men. In the su- 
preme crises of experience the great minds 
seem by a certain innate perception to move 
toward simplicity of expression. There is no 
room in such minds at such times for anything 
exaggerated or gaudy or spectacular. Mr. 
Charles Francis Adams has a fine passage 
concerning the bearing of Grant and Lee at 
Appomattox. Mr. Adams points out that not 
a single word was spoken by either actor in 
the scene to detract from a quiet simplicity 
which marked all the details of the momentous 
transaction. When we think of the vast mean- 
ing of the event we might at first glance feel 
something of a craving for at least a touch of 
the dramatic in the final scene. An immense 
war had been fought through to an immense 
victory on the one side and an immense defeat 
on the other. The people of the North had 
fought with the conviction that the destinies 
of democracy were involved in the right issues 
of the campaign. The people of the South had 
sustained themselves through unparalleled 
privations with the belief that they were fight- 
ing for the sacred cause of liberty. The meet- 
ing between the chief actors might well have 

182 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

been regarded as one upon which the after ages 
would delight to look. Considerations like 
these might have prompted the ordinary leader 
to a little self-conscious posing. But there was 
no posing. The reason was that the actual 
leaders were far from ordinary. Without 
purposely doing so they instinctively did what 
the real fitness of things called for. 

A passage in the Old Testament instructs 
us that on the day of atonement the priests 
laid aside their lavishly embroidered robes 
and clad themselves in simple white. Some- 
thing of the same restraint is becoming in ex- 
pression which aims to deal with the highest 
religious ideas. There are, indeed, splendid 
flights of oratory and magnificent poems in 
the Scriptures. But even in these the quality 
of restraint is marked. If we were searching 
for indications of inspiration in the Scrip- 
tures, we might find that inspiration revealing 
itself in a contrast between our Scriptures and 
other scriptures written at substantially the 
same times. Not only are the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures healthier in moral tone than the others, 
but there is a dignified restraint about the 
former in contrast with the abandonment of 
at least parts of the other. Abandonment has 
its place in a Christian system, but the aban- 

183 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

donment is never that of wantonness or reck- 
lessness. 

Insight into the true demands of the re- 
ligious spirit also has a tendency to keep us 
from the curious and artificial. Eeligion is 
in a sense profoundly natural. It is the out- 
come of really primal feelings. Like every- 
thing else, it has its merely curious phases, 
and, like everything else also, it lends itself 
to artificiality. But religion in its highest 
reaches has very little place either for the 
curious or the artificial. It may be that 
a half-conscious perception of this truth 
underlies present-day impatience with fine- 
spun theological theories. In looking back 
to the period of scholasticism, for example, 
we are sorely tried at the over-systematiza- 
tion of doctrinal statements. The teachers of 
that day dwelt much on essences and sub- 
stances and processions in dealing with the 
divine nature. Each of these terms has very 
likely something of vital meaning even for 
present-day theology. But in medieval days 
the terms were handled with an overelab- 
oration which practically put them out of 
touch with anything real in heaven or on earth, 
though perhaps we would better say that such 
expressions would suggest nothing real to us 

184 



THE ADORNMENT OP DOCTEINE 

to-day. Scholasticism did great work in show- 
ing the futility of overcarefulness and punctil- 
iousness in doctrinal exposition. The student 
of philosophy will give all credit to the scho- 
lastics for working out a terminology some of 
which is lasting in value, and for fashioning 
some philosophic tools whose usefulness we 
have not yet outgrown ; but the curse of scho- 
lasticism was and is its artificiality. 

Many theological dogmas fall into disfavor 
through being too complete. The very fact of 
their completeness suggests the artificial. We 
have no doubt that the so-called evangelical 
churches would insist quite as strongly in 
1912 as ever upon the religious truth which 
must lie at the heart of the doctrine of the 
Trinity. There is in this doctrine a suggestion 
of fullness of moral life in the Divine which 
the churches would not give up without a 
struggle, or even after a struggle. But in 
every church there is increasing unwillingness 
to hear doctrines of the Trinity which are 
overelaborate. We will not listen as com- 
placently as did our fathers to discussions as 
to just what the word "Person'^ means when 
applied to the Persons of the Holy Trinity. 
We would protest, on the one hand, against 
any interpretation of the doctrine which would 

185 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

empty it of vital significance; on the other 
hand, we would turn away from a too com- 
plete discussion, for example, of what the 
different functions of the Persons of the 
Trinity may be. No doubt very many logical 
arguments may be adduced in discussions of 
this kind. But the more logical the arguments 
the more restless the listeners. To be over- 
complete in such a field of theological discus- 
sion jars upon our sense of what is really be- 
coming and fitting. The celebrated divine 
who fifteen or twenty years ago in discussing 
the divinity of Christ established three main 
propositions, namely, pleromatic divinity, 
pleromatic humanity, and hypostatic union, 
might be just as cogent in his logic now as 
then, but he would hardly get much of a hear- 
ing to-day. Thinkers of his kind might pro- 
claim that this is because of the increasing in- 
difference of our day to theological discussion. 
But the objection to this sort of discussion 
does not come from the indifferent. The in- 
different are too indifferent even to object. 
The protest comes from those who are really 
interested in the statement of the religious 
truth, but who instinctively shrink from a too 
clearly artificial exposition of what at least 
ought to be profoundly natural. 

186 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

The sense of restraint also is keeping us 
back from some of the rougher and cruder ut- 
terances of early days. We do not speak thus 
with any desire to belittle the religious phrase- 
ology of our fathers. We would give much if 
we could put into some of our more refined ex- 
pressions the mighty energy that rushed forth 
from the speech of our fathers. So far as our 
Methodist branch of the Church is concerned, 
the fathers had little time for the refinements. 
Methodism was born at a time when only the 
most vigorous shaking could arouse the Eng- 
lish nation from its lethargy. The sins of the 
nation were drunkenness and licentiousness 
and theft and murder; these were the evils 
against which Methodism launched itself. In 
assault on such sins there was scant room for 
the niceties of religious speech. When Meth- 
odism was transported to our country it made 
its chief conquest in pioneer conditions. The 
pioneer life is not a parlor life. Out of the 
roughness of pioneer conditions came a rough- 
ness of speech that was exactly fitted to the 
time and place it was intended to serve. The 
pioneer sins were apt to be rough sins, like 
brawling and fist-fighting. The success of 
men like Peter Cartwright lay in the fact that 
they could attack pioneer conditions with in- 

187 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

struments which reached and transformed the 
pioneer. In the journal of Francis Asbury 
are repeated references to his conviction that 
he must be ^^dreadfully loud and alarming/^ 
Quite likely he succeeded in being both. And 
very surely the preaching that lacked the loud 
and alarming quality would have been futile. 
We must not forget that preaching is, after all^ 
an instrumental statement of the truth. In 
estimating its success we must judge it by the 
effect it produces. The glory of Methodism 
has been the energy with which it pushed its 
conquests on the frontiers. The leader in 
these conquests was the pioneer preacher. 
For him plainness of speech amounting to 
roughness was an absolute necessity. The 
roughness w^as not assumed. It was sincere, 
coming out of a toughness of fiber begotten in 
him by the conditions of which he was a part. 

In what we say about this rough vigor we 
do not mean to imply that there is not room 
in modern preaching for such plainness of 
speech. Thousands upon thousands of men 
cannot understand anything else. Thousands 
of men to-day are in sins as gross as any which 
John Wesley saw. We are not to be classed 
among those sensitive souls who shrink back 
in horror when a preacher uses language which 

188 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

may seem to the conventional to be very sensa- 
tional. The success of some sensational 
preachers arises out of the fact that what to 
some persons seems sensationalism may meet 
a real need. There are men in all ranks of 
society whose real thinking is in essentially 
coarse terms. The question which the evan- 
gelistic preacher has to consider in presenting 
the gospel to such minds is how to speak a 
language which such men will understand. 
The alternative is to throw out this rough 
hempen rope or to let the men go down. In 
the presence of such an alternative we can 
even bring ourselves to endure a crudeness and 
slanginess of speech, if this is the only speech 
that the men to whom it is addressed can 
understand. But there are limits here which 
regard for the fitness of things and some meas- 
ure of good sense ought to impose. 

In Zion's Songster, a Collection of Hymns 
and Spiritual Songs Usually Sung at Camp 
Meetings and Also in Revivals of Religion, 
published by J. and J. Harper in New York 
in 1831, is the following hymn : 

When the fierce north wind, with his airy forces. 
Rears up the Baltic to a roaring fury, 
And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes 
Rushing amain down; 

189 



THE INCREASE OF PAlTH 

Now the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble, 
While the hoarse thunder like a bloody trumpet. 
Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters. 
Quick to devour them. 

Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder. 
If things eternal may be like these earthly; 
Such the dire terror when the great archangel 
Shakes the creation; 

Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven. 
Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes: 
See the graves open and the bones arising! 
Flames all around them! 

Hark! the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches; 
Lively bright horror and amazing anguish 
Stare through their eyeballs, while the living worm lies 
Gnawing within them. 

Thoughts like old vultures prey upon their heartstrings. 
And the smart twinges, when the eye beholds the 
Lofty Judge frowning, and a flood of veageance 
Rolling before him. 

Hopeless immortals, how they scream and shiver! 
While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning. 
Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong 
Down to the center. 

Stop here, my fancy (all away, ye horrid. 
Doleful ideas!), come, arise to Jesus: 
How he sits Godlike, and the saints around him 
Throned, yet adoring! 

Oh, may I sit there, when he comes triumphant. 
Dooming the nations! then ascend to glory. 
While our hosannas all along the passage 
Shout the Redeemer. 
190 



THE ADOENMENT OF DOCTRINE 

We do not know how large use was made 
of this particular hymn; and it is fair to say 
that this is not a sample of the phraseology or 
imagery of the entire collection. Many of the 
hymns in the book are the great hymns, which 
will probably be used through the centuries. 
Moreoyer, we recognize a rugged force in this 
hymn, and we can feel something of the power 
that it must have had with a congregation 
eighty years ago. We recognize also the eter- 
nal truth which is embodied in the hymn. 
Apart, however, from the presence or absence 
of poetic quality we could hardly think of this 
hymn as likely to endure through any but a 
special period of the Church's life. No matter 
what the effectiveness of the stanzas may have 
been in other days, we should hardly expect 
much effectiveness from such style of compo- 
sition to-day. In spite of all the extravagance 
and exaggeration and crudeness of utterance 
in the time in which we live, the most effec- 
tive statement is apt to be restrained. Merely 
for rhetorical purposes understatement is apt 
to be quite as powerful as overstatement. The 
passage which suggests by a touch here and 
there is quite as productive of the right im- 
pression as the passage which comes forth in 
attempt at complete expression. When such 

191 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

completeness is aimed at the impression finally 
left is one of crudeness. 

And all this leads up to the unwillingness 
of some very worthy religious thinkers to at- 
tempt to put some insights into speech at all. 
Some truths are better suggested than defi- 
nitely declared. We ask indulgence for re- 
peated harking back to the principle of effec- 
tiveness in a discussion which professedly aims 
at emphasis on the fitness of things in itself, 
but the fit expression is, after all, the effective 
expression. Some truths or facts are too great 
to be described. We lack as yet the speech 
instruments for their description. The best 
we can do is to point a learner toward the 
mood in which the significance of the truth can 
be sensed rather than declared. One of the 
sublimest passages in Victor Hugo is his de- 
scription of the battle of Waterloo in Les 
Miserables. The description is an attempt at 
definite and measurably complete setting 
forth of the battle. Upon one type of reader 
the effect is no doubt overwhelming. But an- 
other reader feels, after all, the incompleteness 
of the labored attempt at completeness. A 
student of Thackeray has somewhere remarked 
that perhaps quite as effective an impression 
of the greatness of Napoleon is to be obtained 

192 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

from the few references to Napoleon on the 
pages of Vanity Fair as from any direct de- 
scription by other writers of the battles of Na- 
poleon. The significance of Waterloo is al- 
most as clearly seen by Thackeray's story of 
what was passing in Brussels on the day of the 
battle as by the direct statement of the prog- 
ress of the battle itself. Yet Thackeray's 
chapter has its force merely in suggestion. 
From some incidents of confusion on the 
streets of Brussels — incidents that could be 
fully described — ^we can imagine that tumult 
and shouting of the captains at the front which 
could never be described. 

Likewise in the realm of religious life there 
are some experiences w^hich are beyond de- 
scription. There are some truths which can- 
not be compassed in theoretical statement. 
Take, for example, that final setting forth of 
the love of God which we have in the cross of 
Christ. Why is it that we feel so uncertain 
about theories of atonement? Is it because we 
are indifferent to the love of God obviously 
set on high in the cross of Christ? Very likely 
the cross means more to-day to devout believ- 
ers than it has ever meant. Just because it 
means more there is distrust of theory. No 
one theory is adequate, and after all the the- 

193 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

ories have been added together and the good 
of each accepted at its highest value we still 
feel that the formulations are inadequate. We 
look upon each theory as the attempt of a par- 
ticular age to phrase that age's best thought 
of God in the highest and best utterance. But 
the voice of no one age is complete, and the 
voices of all the Christian centuries are not 
complete. And beyond all this anything which 
is a theory of the cross cannot in the nature 
of things be complete, for the cross is more 
than theory. Anything which has to do with 
divine moral passion is more than theory. So 
while we frame for ourselves attempts at scien- 
tific formulation of the doctrine of the cross, 
we do so with the inner reservation that these 
formulations must be taken as mere sugges- 
tions or adumbrations of a truth which we 
cannot express. The greater part is the unex- 
pressed part. The sense of fitness prevents us 
from trying to express the truth too com- 
pletely. There is a vast realm here which is 
to be explored by reverent and reticent senti- 
ment rather than by scientific and logical ex- 
pertness. In this realm there is something 
almost irreverent, something almost imperti- 
nent about too definite a statement. Henri 
Bergson in his Creative Evolution makes the 

194 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

point that as soon as we harden a living ex- 
perience down into articulate logical state- 
ment we have moved away from the peculiarly 
living quality of the experience itself. Berg- 
son finds fullness of life only in the actual 
moment of living. As soon as we get far 
enough away from the experience to talk about 
it we have taken a step away from life, and by 
the time we have reached logical articulation 
the living quality is almost gone. However 
this may be as concerns life in general, Berg- 
son is on the path toward a truth as concerns 
religious life. The language cannot keep 
pace with the life. 

This truth becomes all the more apparent 
when we think of the relation of the indi- 
vidual soul to God. There is always need 
of testimony to the presence of God from 
lips touched by the power of God. There is 
need of fuller public confession of sin on the 
part of many who profess to be disciples. It 
would do the world good to have fuller glimp- 
ses into the inner life of the saints. The or- 
dinary man would be helped if he could open 
the closet door of the saint and see the saint 
upon his knees. Vast benefit would accrue to 
believers everywhere if they could know how 
widespread is the fact of communion between 

195 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

the greatest lives and the Divine Life. But 
there is in these experiences themselves an ele- 
ment that transcends speech, though we are 
not now referring to experiences that are 
transcendently mystical. There are some ex- 
periences which are common to all; any intel- 
ligent Christian can understand them; but 
there are other experiences which are peculiar 
to the individual. These experiences partake 
of the nature of confidences between the finite 
soul and the Infinite Soul. They have a sacred- 
ness like the sacredness of the intercourse be- 
tween two friends of high and refined feeling 
who respect each the confidences of the other. 
We may well be thankful for the emphasis 
upon the need of friendship with God. We 
hear much about the love of God, but love in 
the sense of mutual affection is possible be- 
tween two persons who may not be able to 
commune together in the full sense possible to 
friends. We hear much about men as children 
of God in the sense that men are the little chil- 
dren of God. We should be grateful for the 
growing emphasis on that conception of men as 
the sons of God which implies the possibility 
of that maturer companionship which we think 
of as holding between friends. Now, friend- 
ship does not show itself altogether in out- 

196 



THE ADOENMENT OF DOCTRINE 

right utterance. Understanding between two 
friends may be so complete that frequent 
speech is not necessary. Two friends may be 
separated by the width of the globe, with no 
communication passing between them, and yet 
each may feel at every instant that he thor- 
oughly understands and sympathizes with the 
other. While w^e believe that God is always 
near us, there are times when in a sense he 
seems to be at a distance. He may for the 
moment seem to hide himself, or his ways may 
be past finding out; still, there is possible for 
the saint even at such moments an unshaken 
trust w^hich is like the trust which holds be- 
tween friends. These experiences cannot well 
be talked about, but the very fact that there 
are such experiences, and, we believe, such ex- 
periences in increasing number, makes an 
atmosphere in which restrained and dignified 
religious expression seems more and more 
satisfyingly beautiful. 

We have made much use of the term "re- 
straint.'^ We would rather, after all, insist 
that as we stand in the presence of what is fine 
in itself the very fineness may make us realize 
the impotence and futility of our expression. 
Suppose we stand before a great picture. Any 
attempt to describe the picture will fall short 

197 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

of the picture itself. We have all noticed the 
silence that prevails in art galleries. The 
silence is fitting. Loudness and volubility are 
out of place in the presence of a surpassing 
work of art. So with any manifestation of 
transcendent genius. A celebrated American 
man of letters has told of the evening when 
with a companion he went over from Cam- 
bridge to Boston to hear Edgar Allan Poe read 
a new poem. Poe appeared before the au- 
dience and announced that he would not read 
a new poem, but one with which his hearers 
were already familiar. There was at first a 
rustle of disappointment in the audience, but 
all became quiet as Poe started to read. For 
the auditors perceived at once that Poe was 
in the creative mood out of which the poem 
had come. As Poe read on through the stanzas 
his hearers realized that they were hearing a 
genius at the very top of his power. When 
the reading finished, the audience dispersed 
with hardly any man speaking to his neighbor. 
The two friends who had come over from Cam- 
bridge walked back across the Charles without 
the utterance of a word until they had reached 
their home. The reason was not that any 
mystic spell had been cast over the audience, 
but, rather, that each appreciated so fully the 

198 



THE ADOENMENT OF DOCTRINE 

surpassing manifestation of genius that he 
felt that any word would be out of place. 

What, now, is a manifestation of literary 
genius compared with a manifestation of a 
spirit of nobility or of self-sacrifice in its 
power to chain the attention of the world by 
the very fineness of the deed itself? If we were 
to drop out of literature and song the inspira- 
tion which has come from the contemplation 
of deeds fine in themselves, we would have 
very little left. The traditions of armies and 
navies which nations most fondly cherish are 
not altogether those of splendid equipment or 
of excellence in drill or of effectiveness of 
onslaught on the field of battle. The mind of 
the nation singles out some scene of outstand- 
ing valor, some moment when a leader has 
forgotten his own peril in the glory of aban- 
donment to his cause, some instant when a 
hero leaps to inevitable death for the sake of 
his flag. These are the eternal moments and 
the eternal scenes in the sense that they have 
about them the quality of eternity. Or some 
man gives his life for his fellows in time of 
plague or surrenders his place to another in 
the lifeboat of a sinking ship. These are the 
fine things, but they are fine beyond all de- 
scription or expression. 

199 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

The world is coming more and more to see 
the fineness of the kingdom of God as a thing 
in itself. Even on the theoretical and specu- 
lative side there is an element of protest 
against atheism, for example, which is deeper 
than logic. Our sense of balance presses for 
a fuller universe than the atheist would give 
us. We feel that the material must be bal- 
anced by the spiritual. We feel that things 
must not be left at loose ends, that there must 
be Some One for whom and by whom the loose 
ends are gathered up into some significant 
meaning. We crave a universe with a fineness 
of symmetry on its own account. We wish 
for individual lives an opportunity to come to 
fullness of proportion. We feel that the 
quality of the universe must be protected by a 
force that will give it an inherent nobility. 
Especially do we crave some power in human 
lives to make them really worthy ends in them- 
selves. 

As we read through the Gospels we find 
abundant indications that Christ was think- 
ing of his kingdom as a kingdom of ends in 
themselves. He valued men not as invest- 
ments, not as instruments altogether, but as 
ends in themselves. He would have men serv- 
ants of God, but after the men have done all 

200 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

they can do as mere servants they are un- 
profitable servants. Men come to themselves 
when they come to be sons of God. Men have 
value in the sight of God not because of what 
they can do for God so much as because of the 
fact that they can enter into appreciative com- 
panionship with God. When we think of the 
kingdom of heaven as an existence hereafter 
we dream of a realm where things stand in 
their own right and on their own account. In 
our earthly sphere the instrumental phases of 
existence necessarily engross our attention. 
We are putting this and that together so as to 
get something else. This, however, cannot be 
the final phase. We long for a realm where 
the fine things are valued simply for their own 
fineness. 

The words of Jesus are fine on their own 
account. His life was a life fine on its own 
account. Both his teaching and his life come 
to their climax in the cross, and the spirit of 
the cross is fine on its own account. A dis- 
tinguished philosopher once said that Chris- 
tianity may be only a beautiful dream, but 
that if so, it is the most beautiful dream that 
has ever come to the minds of men. We be- 
lieve that Christianity is more than a dream. 
The insistent pressure that would make Chris- 

20X 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

tianity more truly actual is a craving for the 
fitness of things. We cannot be permanently 
satisfied with times that are out of joint. 
Somewhere we must reach unity and. consist- 
ency and symmetry and fineness. The idea of 
God as set before us in Christianity is a beau- 
tiful idea and reaches the height of its beauty 
in the revelation of Christ. 

Jesus once spoke of the kingdom of heaven 
as like unto a merchantman seeking goodly 
pearls. We are glad that Jesus spoke of his 
kingdom as pearl. He used other figures of 
speech to set forth the predominantly useful 
aspects of the kingdom. He is the Physician 
who will heal sick souls. He is the Bread of 
Life upon whom all may feed. The kingdom 
of the Cross is medicine for disease and bread 
for the hungry. But it is pearl also. When 
we think of pearl we lose sight of the more 
practical orders of usefulness. The pearl min- 
isters not to disease and not to hunger, except 
to that nobler hunger for what is fine in itself. 
The teaching of Jesus, the cross of Christ, the 
revelation of God — all this is pearl. We shall 
always need the presentation of the cross as 
redemption from sin and as sustenance for 
laboring, struggling souls. Out of the doctrine 
of the cross as redemption and nourishment 

202 



THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 

there will come increasingly forceful puttings 
of the doctrine of the kingdom. All these put- 
tings, however, will be inadequate if there is 
not also some realization of the pearl-like 
beauty of the gospel. The man who sees this 
beauty may not be as outspoken as the prophet 
who w^ould bring the gospel to sick souls, or as 
the leader who would minister to the massive 
material needs of men. But he will be no less 
effective than they. He will bring to men an 
atmosphere of appreciation of the beauty of 
the gospel, an atmosphere which will inevi- 
tably mellow and chasten the hardness and 
barrenness of much doctrinal statement. 

To conclude: anything which begets a real 
sense for and appreciation of the beautiful 
will make for the increase of faith. The crav- 
ing for beauty is so much a part of us that it 
must come from the divine source of beauty. 
Men will not long allow the good and the true 
and the beautiful to stand in separate spheres. 
The beautiful is so closely linked to the good 
and true that if the beautiful is given a chance 
to reveal itself, it will reveal also something of 
the true and good. 



203 



VI 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

One of the striking features of theological 
discussion during the past fifty years has been 
the renewed prominence given to Christ. The 
biblical studies have as their net result the 
teaching that all parts of the Scriptures are 
to be judged by the spirit of Christ as the test 
and standard of their final worth. The Church 
in present-day theory has its value as an in- 
strument for getting the Christ spirit and the 
Christ thought and the Christ life into effective 
working relationship with the forces of the 
world. Any theory or system which aims at 
the uplift of the world takes on new power 
w^hen it can claim for itself the sanction of 
the Christian spirit or can baptize itself with 
the name of Christ. 

This prominence of Christ must be due to 
the satisfaction of demands arising out of hu- 
man needs. We cannot feel that Christ has 
in any artificial fashion been pushed to the 
front. His doctrine and deed and spirit must 

204 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

minister to the needs of to-day and must 
satisfy some imperious demands. What are 
some of these demands, and how do preaching 
and teaching Christ satisfy them? 

In the first place, Christ satisfies the de- 
mand for some final fixity, at least of mean- 
ing, in the unceasing fiow and transformation 
of the universe. An impression which we 
bring back from scientific study is that in the 
natural world all is movement and change. 
In our own bodies we live through an inces- 
sant storm of change. Organs which seem 
part of our very selves are renewed day by day. 
All organic nature sweeps along from change 
to change with incredible swiftness. Even 
classifications of forms which we yesterday 
looked upon as hard-and-fast are now seen to 
be merely provisional and temporary. If we 
think we can find fixity even in the inorganic 
realm, we find that we must correct our expec- 
tations. The physicist tells us that the most 
inert masses beneath our feet are throbbing 
with energies which constantly change their 
direction, and the chemist smiles when we ex- 
press our naive belief that the elements are 
necessarily final and must remain as they now 
are forever. 

We are aware that this is no new problem. 

205 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

The Greeks wrestled with the puzzle of change 
and fixity. But the problem is really vaster 
for us to-day than for the Greeks. The ma- 
terial universe is much more overwhelming. 
The distances are longer and the stretches of 
time are measured in terms which w^ould have 
staggered the Greeks. We must give up the 
attempt to find any really fixed point in the 
physical system itself. What seems to us to 
be permanent is only activity repeated accord- 
ing to a law which calls for repetition. The 
permanence of any phase of the physical sys- 
tem is like the permanence of a flame which 
may stand for a time at a given height and 
burn with a given intensity, but which, never- 
theless, is in constant movement. The slight- 
est change in any one of a dozen forces work- 
ing through the flame will modify its intensity 
or its color, or extinguish it altogether. The 
apparent solidity even of a mountain is, when 
viewed across the stretch of a geological 
period, largely illusive, depending upon the 
steadiness of forces which race along with 
vast speed. Somewhere, we know, there must 
be a relatively permanent factor standing 
across this flow of things. Else we never 
could become aware that there is a flow. 
Existence would be sliced into inconceiv- 

206 



f HE DEMAND FOR CHUlST 

ably thin sections, each of which would 
perish as soon as it was born. Familiarity 
with the problem of knowledge shows us 
that the permanent factor must be in the 
realm of spirit. Without entering into the 
metaphysics of psychological existence, we 
know that there must be within ourselves some 
power to abide from moment to moment, some 
power to weave complexity into unity, some 
memory to gather up the past and make it 
live in consciousness. We do find in the very 
act of knowing some ability in ourselves to 
stand across the stream of change and to know 
the stream as a stream. 

But this does not help us much. To begin 
with, change enters into the very heart of our 
inmost life. We are the same that we were 
when we were children, and yet we are not the 
same. Our spiritual powers rise to strength 
and sink to decay. More significant still, our 
ideals know both increase and loss. The social 
institutions of mankind, the ideas which fash- 
ion man's companionships with his fellows, 
his conceptions of religion — all these are sub- 
ject to infiuences which lift them up and cast 
them down. Both the realm of nature and 
the inner life of individuals and communities 
offer little in the way of a permanent resist- 

207 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

anee to the stream of changes in the midst of 
which we live. 

It is in Christianity that we find any meas- 
ure of relief from the dizziness of contemplat- 
ing the world of change. The relief is spir- 
itual. We come at last upon an idea of God 
and an idea of man which brings at least a 
measure of meaning into the vast procession 
upon which we gaze. The theistic metaphy- 
sician arrives at the end of his reasonings at 
the idea of a God who founds change without 
himself being involved in change. The theist 
holds that God is above change, not in the 
sense that change means nothing to him, but 
in the sense that change brings nothing to 
him of either increase or loss of power. Men 
are above change in the sense that they are 
able to hold in consciousness the varying in- 
stants of the stream long enough to under- 
stand the meaning of the movement, but men 
are in change in the sense that they are under 
the law of development and are dependent 
upon the changes of the universe for the at- 
tainment of their own fullest life. While 
carrying forward the changes of the uni- 
verse, God is above change in the sense 
of possessing power to keep the entire stream 
before his mind and to withstand any suction 

208 



I 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

of the stream which would draw him into its 
current. We are not, however, so much con- 
cerned at this juncture with the God of the 
mere theist as with the God of the Christian. 
Christ set before men an ideal of an unvary- 
ing love at the heart of the universe. He did 
not pretend to construe this love in terms of 
theoretical statement. He simply told of the 
love of the Father in heaven, whose love fail- 
eth not, and he set this love on high in his own 
life and death. There is a sense in which even 
this ideal of Christ changes, but it changes in 
a fixed direction. It changes in the sense 
that men understand it better as the years 
go by. The love of God knows no change, 
but the heart of man reaches after and 
attains unto that love by rhythmic pulsings. 
God is Love. God is the Father of men. 
Christ's ideal is that men should come to such 
purity of heart that they can enter into com- 
panionship with God forever. Our thought of 
God and of Christ and of man is under the law 
of change, but the change is in a fixed direc- 
tion from glory to glory. 

Again, there is a real though perhaps uncon 
scions demand for Christ to-day — that is to 
say, for the thought and deed and spirit of 
Christ set before us in the New Testament — 

209 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

as a supplement and corrective for the results 
of the scientific method in the study of the 
Scriptures. We are not likely to overempha- 
size the importance of modern biblical study 
for the better understanding of the Bible. 
These studies have given the Book new vital- 
ity. They have helped us to discern a new 
permanence in both the Old and New Testa- 
ments and to cast out the incidental and non- 
essential. We see as never before the trend of 
the old national life of the Jews toward Christ, 
the satisfaction of their hopes and of the hopes 
of the world in Christ, and the mighty mo- 
mentum of the early apostolic enthusiasm. 
One of the greatest achievements of modern 
science is the success which has followed the 
application of the scientific method to scrip- 
tural study. Even where the students of the 
Scriptures have been somewhat hostile to the 
claims of orthodox Christianity the final re- 
sults have been good. The most hostile critic 
has often brought forth a theory worthy of 
consideration, and the discussion of the theory 
has put the Church on the path of a truth 
whose existence the hostile critic may not of 
himself have suspected. 

Very little harm has been done by the hos- 
tile critic of the Scriptures. Some harm is 

210 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

continually wrought by the student who is an 
exponent of the scientific method and is noth- 
ing else. Such a student is apt to look upon 
the Scriptures merely as an intellectually con- 
trived mechanism. He does not sense the 
vividness and warmth of the life which plays 
across the pages of the Scriptures; nor does 
he often enough reflect that the Scriptures 
were written by human beings. Dealing with 
the Book thus as a merely intellectual contri- 
vance, he may reach all manner of astounding 
conclusions. If he finds passages in a scrip- 
tural book which seem to him to be contradic- 
tory to each other, he will have it that the 
passages must have come from different 
periods of history or have been written by 
different hands. If he discovers analogies be- 
tween scriptural accounts and accounts in 
other literatures which are evidently solar 
myths, he is apt to conclude at once that the 
scriptural narratives are largely solar myths. 
He forgets that it is perfectly possible to move 
even through current history and resolve 
many of the men of our own time into solar 
myths! Students of the curious in literature 
will remember that an acute Frenchman once 
wrote a satire to prove that Napoleon Bona- 
parte was a sun myth. Napoleon had been 

211 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

dead only a few years when the satire was 
written, but the author proved conclusively 
that the Corsican was a myth. Napoleon, for 
example, prevailed in the south, as in Egypt, 
and lost in the north, as in the Eussian cam- 
paign. The sun likewise prevails in the south 
and loses strength in the north. This argu- 
ment is fully as conclusive as the argument 
that Jacob must be regarded as a sun myth 
because on one occasion the sun rose upon 
him ! We would not deny the worth of scien- 
tific study which proceeds upon the principle 
of analogy, but we would insist that scientific 
study must be supplemented and corrected by 
an understanding of the motives and proc- 
esses of real life. The method of the division 
and reassignment of scriptural documents be- 
cause of differences discovered in passages 
which we have thought of as constituting a 
unified whole is fruitful. But the differences 
must be really significant. If we find side by 
side allusions to customs of a particular time 
and allusions to customs of two centuries 
later, w^e know that the document cannot have 
been written at the period of the earlier cus- 
toms. Or, if the ideas in the different parts 
of a single document are widely divergent 
from each other, the parts must clearly have 

212 



THE DEMAND FOE CHRIST 

come from differing periods. But so far as 
minor differences are concerned, these can 
easily be found in the works of a single author. 
Men speak now with one set of phrases and 
now with another. They become possessed of 
certain ideas which hold them for a time, and 
then they are captivated by another set. We 
would not have to go far into the authenticated 
reports of speeches delivered in this year of 
nineteen hundred and twelve to discover the 
most glaring contradictions in the utterances 
of this or that public leader. A merely in- 
tellectualistic critic could on the basis of these 
utterances split more than one public char- 
acter to-day into at least a dozen characters. 

All this is true of biblical study in general. 
When we come to the study of the Gospels we 
must be careful to supplement the scientific 
method with genuine appreciation of the spirit 
of Christianity. Some students in our own 
day have made a good deal of stir by profess- 
ing to have proved that Jesus never existed. 
The reasoning may seem very conclusive to 
readers of a certain type. The best corrective 
against such excess is in an attempt to seize 
the spirit of the gospel narrative concerning 
Jesus — to take the portrait just as it stands 
and try to realize the spiritual content, to 

213 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

attempt to understand the implications of 
Christ's doctrine of God and of man. When 
the Gospels are approached thus we have a 
sense as of having come into touch with some- 
thing actual and real. If the Scripture is 
studied by a man who is trying to order his 
life according to the spirit of the New Testa- 
ment, such a man has a corrective against the 
excesses of the purely scientific method like 
the corrective which contact with real life 
always affords. 

The scientific student becomes very im- 
patient with the popular indifference to some 
of his theories concerning the beginnings of 
Christianity. He wonders that even intelli- 
gent Christians do not seem to appreciate the 
results of his investigation. The popular im- 
patience is not with the scientific method as 
such. People in general recognize the virtue 
of that method. The indifference arises out 
of the fact that there is on the part of the 
Church as a whole a general knowledge of 
Christ and a general demand for him. In 
specific items this knowledge and demand need 
correction, but likewise the specific findings 
of the scientific student need correction by a 
general appreciation of Christ's thought of 
God and of man and of his setting on high of 

214 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

that thought in his own life and death. The 
real dangers in the scientific study of the 
Scriptures are the dangers of scientific study 
anywhere, the dangers which beset the special- 
ists. If it is true that the specialist in me- 
chanics or medicine or law is safe only as he 
is familiar with the general and fundamental 
truths which lie at the base of his science in 
common with other kindred sciences, so it is 
also true that the scientific student of the 
Scriptures is likely to lose himself and lead 
others astray if he has not that power to see 
truth steadily and to see it whole which should 
mark the thinking of the Christian disciple. 

Lest all this may seem critical of biblical 
students, we again profess our admiration for 
the results of biblical study. We have said 
that we do not fear the hostile critic of Chris- 
tianity. May we be permitted also to say that 
we do not much fear even the too technical, 
over-specialized critic? For the general im- 
pression which the Christ life as a whole makes 
upon modern life as a whole, and the general 
satisfaction of modern life with that impres- 
sion, is a corrective and safeguard against any 
evils likely to come from scientific biblical re- 
search. The very extremeness of the utter- 
ances of some biblical students has made a 

215 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

fresh demand for the presentation of the 
Christ-life and teaching in their large and 
fundamental outlines. As a reaction from 
overemphasis on microscopic detail there is 
renewed demand to-day for emphasis on the 
outline ideas of Christian teaching. After 
minute study of the trees men are again call- 
ing for a survey of the sweep and majesty of 
the forest. 

In our second lecture we sketched the prog- 
ress of modern philosophy from materialism 
through idealism to personalism and pragma- 
tism. We here note the impulse which pre- 
vails in practically all schools of philosophy 
to attempt to connect philosophic systems 
with the teaching and spirit of Christ. All the 
world knows how Christian thinking has of 
late been friendly to the evolutionary hy- 
pothesis, and how welcome this hospitality on 
the part of Christianity has been to the large 
body of evolutionists themselves. The reason 
is not merely that philosophic critics have 
drawn a distinction between evolution as an 
order of progress and evolution as a theory of 
causation, and have pointed out that there is 
nothing hostile to Christianity in evolution as 
an order of progress. The scientific thinkers 
realize the hold which Christ has on the life of 

216 



THE DEMAND FOE CHRIST 

the world. If such scientists are not them- 
selves materialistically inclined they feel that 
this grasp of Christ is one of the great cosmic 
forces, and they feel also that evolution has 
not come to its final statement so long as it 
does not take account of this grasp. More- 
over, the evolutionary process by itself pre- 
sents rather a grim spectacle. We cannot 
help being impressed "with the enormity of the 
cost with which the evolutionary factors do 
their w^ork. Many evolutionists, indeed, teach 
that there is another aspect beyond mere strug- 
gle for survival, namely, the struggle for the 
life of others. But the emphasis on the strug- 
gle for the life of others can hardly be effective 
without reference to the teaching and spirit of 
Christ, The evolutionary procession itself 
raises many questions. From where to where 
is the procession moving? Who is leading the 
procession? What is the aim of the proces- 
sion? Why should there be a procession? 
ATho gives it marching orders and sets its 
pace? Has the procession any halting place? 
All these problems clamor for an answer. 
There is no answer simply from contemplat- 
ing the procession itself. Hence there is a 
rather general agreement to-day that prin- 
ciples at least measurably Christian must be 

217 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

called in before we can make much of evo- 
lution. 

Another student may choose to remain an 
idealist in spite of the modern movement away 
from idealism of the stricter sort. But any 
really serious-minded person soon feels that 
idealism is rather barren if there cannot be an 
answer to the question as to whose ideas or 
what ideas are constitutive of reality. There 
are ideas and ideas. All ideas are not on the 
same plane. Hence it is not surprising that 
the more morally and spiritually minded ideal- 
ists find delight in the prologue to the fourth 
Gospel. They turn to Christ as the Word that 
really utters the universe — as the Reason, 
which, immanent in the universe, comes to 
personal expression in human terms. The doc- 
trine of the Logos is especially attractive to 
members of the Hegelian school. The Hege- 
lians also seem willing to use such terms as 
Incarnation and Atonement. True, they do 
not ordinarily use these terms in the orthodox 
sense, but the very use of the terms shows the 
ready willingness of this school of philosophy 
to reach out a hand almost of supplication to- 
ward Christianity. 

Those who have broken away from idealism 
and have become personalists likewise feel the 

218 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

need of some exemplar or leader who shall 
really interpret the meaning of personal ex- 
istence. Suppose that we grant for the mo- 
ment the extreme claims of some personalists 
that all individual souls have existed in their 
individuality from eternity. Even with this 
admission we must be impressed with the dif- 
ference in persons. If there is to be develop- 
ment in persons^ the most thoroughgoing in- 
dividualist would have the worst persons catch 
something of the spirit of the better persons. 
We cannot find a suitable ideal in ourselves or 
in our neighbors or in the mass of mankind. 
Almost any fair-minded student will admit 
that, without regard to the historical and 
critical issues involved in the study of the 
Gospels, the acceptance of the portrait of 
Jesus substantially as that portrait is put be- 
fore us in the New Testament is the most im- 
perative duty for any doctrine of personalism. 
The doctrine of personalism must stand or 
fall with the type of person the theory accepts 
as standard. If personalism is to mean the 
wild lunging about of selfish individuals, each 
acting out the lower impulses of his own life, 
we have anarchy ; and any system which leads 
to anarchy must be cast out. If the normal in 
human life is put above the actual or the aver- 

219 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

age state of men, we must find the normal 
most adequately set forth in the great individ- 
uals of human history. The personal moun- 
tain peaks must give direction to the move- 
ment of men through their earthly pilgrimage ; 
all of which makes a demand for human per- 
sonality interpreted in terms of Christ as the 
Supreme Norm and Standard. 

If personalism must finally turn toward 
Christ, so also must pragmatism. We have 
already enumerated some conditions which 
pragmatism must meet in order to satisfy the 
largest human demands. Too many pragma- 
tists speak as if their creed means that a man 
may believe whatever happens to agree with 
him. Before we accept such a statement we 
must know what the word "agree" means. 
The doctrine that a man may believe whatever 
agrees with him is not much more intelligent 
than the doctrine that a man may eat whatever 
agrees with him. "Agree'^ ought certainly to 
mean more than to taste pleasant. Some 
foods taste pleasant, but are poisonous or in- 
nutritious or unsubstantial. A man may, in- 
deed, eat whatever agrees with him, but if he is 
a normal man the food must partake of the 
fundamental elements which nourish and build 
up the body. Likewise a man may believe 

220 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

whatever agrees with him, but his belief ought 
to nourish and build up his entire life. Here, 
again, we need a norm and a standard. Chris- 
tianity uses the pragmatic method, but finds 
the norm and standard in Christ. Without sub- 
scribing to the doctrine that pragmatism has 
other than merely instrumental value, we may 
say that pragmatism does seem wonderfully 
fitted to be a useful tool for Christianity. 
Every man that willeth to do the will of God 
comes into sympathy at least with the spirit 
of Christ. But Christianity brings elements 
into pragmatism that may not be acceptable to 
the philosophical adherents of the system. 
Christianity accepts the truth that we learn 
by doing and that the final tests are the tests 
of life. In real life — by which we mean life 
at its highest and best — cross-bearing plays a 
part. Not by accident did the Master say that 
any man who would be his disciple must take 
up a cross daily. Now, the objection to cross- 
bearing is that it seems to ask us to believe 
and do what does not promise to agree with us. 
We come again upon the age-old paradox of 
Christianity that a man who would save his 
life must lose it. The danger with pragmatism 
is that it tends to become too easy. In the 
presence of hard philosophic problems it may 

221 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

turn away from a rugged wrestling on the 
ground that rugged wrestling is too hard. So 
in the presence of the cross. The pragmatist 
may, like Peter of old, glimpse a truth which 
means the highest and fullest life, and yet in 
the next instant deserve a rebuke for an un- 
willingness to master the implications of the 
truth in cross-bearing. If pragmatism is to 
remain respectable as the statement of a philo- 
sophic method, it needs something or some one 
to keep it in the straight and narrow path. 
The temptation of pragmatism is to slip over 
to the broad way. There are many pragma- 
tists in the broad way. Pragmatism needs to 
be kept difficult. Before it can be discipline 
even for human minds it must exact some- 
thing of the steadiness of mental effort which 
the great idealistic systems require. Before 
pragmatism can be a discipline for the entire 
life it must see and lay stress upon the signi- 
ficance of cross-bearing for the attainment of 
spiritual insight. Much learning, indeed, 
comes out of reflective brooding; much out of 
vigorous and persistent doing ; much out of un- 
selfish suffering. Bearing the cross does not 
imply asceticism; against asceticism or any 
other unnatural abnormality we strenuously 
protest. Christianity does not enjoin need- 

222 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

less suffering. It does not even exalt the spirit 
which would seek after suffering, but it does 
compel men to accept and walk in the straight 
and narrow way which leads to life. If prag- 
matism ever attains to great power, it will 
have to heed the world^s demand for considera- 
tion of that cross which represents the divine 
willingness to bear burdens for the sake of 
others. Upon one occasion Jesus told his dis- 
ciples to rejoice when men persecuted them 
and said all manner of evil against them 
falsely for the sake of truth, ^^for so persecuted 
they the prophets w^hich were before you.'' 
The words w^ould seem to give us some hint 
as to a method of coming to an understanding 
of the prophets. There might conceivably be 
many ways of studying the life of a prophet. 
One might read, mark, and inwardly digest all 
the words of a prophet. Then one might visit 
the scenes of the prophet's life and attempt 
to reproduce in imagination the great events 
which the force of the prophet had brought to 
pass. In other words, one might learn some- 
thing of a prophet by looking backward at the 
prophet himself. But one could learn more 
by looking around upon conditions like those 
which made the prophet burn with wrath and 
then by casting oneself against the evils which 

223 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

call for a prophet^s fire. When one had met 
something of the resistant force of evil after 
attacking that evil, when one had been perse- 
cuted for the sake of the truth, then, indeed, 
one might begin to understand the prophets of 
old. The best way to study Elijah is to rebuke 
evils like those which Elijah rebuked. What- 
ever the real prophet does he does not follow 
the line of least resistance. He cuts new 
channels even if he has to receive upon him- 
self all the shock which comes to the cutting 
edge. Pragmatism as method of learning the 
truths supremely worth while must keep off 
the line of least resistance. Whatever else 
Christ may or may not do as a leader of men, 
he will not lead them along the lines of least 
resistance. 

The modern social movements also make a 
demand for a vigorous statement and restate- 
ment of the thought and spirit of Christ. 
Such a statement is clearly needed to help us 
keep our balance between the swing toward 
masses which would submerge the individual 
and the opposite swing toward individuals 
which would ignore the organic dependence of 
individuals on each other. We may say, on 
the one hand, that Christ discovered the in- 
dividual — or, rather, that he discovers individ- 

224 



THE DEMAND FOR CHEIST 

uals — and, on the other hand, that he gave 
new force to the social relationships of in- 
dividuals. There is little in the words of Jesus 
to suggest such terms as "masses/^ or "hu- 
manity/^ or "mankind/^ If he wishes to speak 
of mankind he says "all men/^ Yet even the 
prayer which the Master holds up as a model 
is predominantly social. "Our Father/^ '^our 
daily bread/^ "forgive us our trespasses as we 
forgive/^ "lead us not into temptation'^ — ex- 
pressions like these do not suggest unrelated 
individuals. They suggest an organism which, 
in the thought of the Founder of Christianity, 
is to be coextensive with humanity. Yet Jesus 
does not suggest the term "organism'^ or "hu- 
manity.^' He suggests the idea of men as mem- 
bers of a family. 

The contribution of Jesus to the social move- 
ment is the force which he has put into the 
thought of men as members of a family. Bio- 
logical terms like "social organism,'^ mechani- 
cal and artificial terms which abound in many 
theories of the state as a deliberate creation, 
legal expressions like "rights'^ and "implied 
contracts" — these do not have the force of the 
emphasis of Jesus on men as members of a 
family. Social theories depend for much of 
their force on the religious ideas back of them 

225 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

or implied in them. It is hardly too much to 
claim that no social theory becomes really 
dynamic or vital until it has taken on a re- 
ligious form, or has been incorporated with 
some religious theory, or has, at least, been 
touched with religious fervor. Christ's 
thought of the brotherhood of man is joined 
to his thought of the Fatherhood of God. God 
is the Head of the family. The service of our 
brothers is at the same time a service of the 
Father. Most social theories, however, which 
speak of masses and humanity have as their 
religious presupposition a sort of pantheistic 
notion of Humanitv as itself God. Manv ad- 
herents of such pantheism wax very eloquent 
in their advocacy of Humanity as the sole and 
sufficient object of religious effort. But such 
social enthusiasm can be kept up only as it is 
heated so high that any coolness of reflection 
is out of the question, for such reflection shows 
that Humanity, after all, is but a class term. 
The concrete facts are men, women, and chil- 
dren in various relationships to one another. 
In the Christian view we find an adequate mo- 
tive for devotion to the help of men in the fact 
of what they are. They are children of the 
Father in heaven. We show our worshipful 
spirit toward God by devotion to men, but we 

226 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

do not find in the men themselves a full object 
of worship. What is Humanity? Humanity 
is human beings — present, past, and to come. 
But human beings of to-day do not give us a 
God that we can worship, no matter how pan- 
theistic our theory may be. Human beings of 
the past were probably not much better, and 
posterity has not yet arrived. There is not 
sufficient force in the duty of working for pos- 
terity to make the duty altogether self-impel- 
ling. We ourselves are the posterity of those 
who have gone before, and our posterity may 
not be very greatly different from ourselves. 
We can, however, be very patient with the 
frailties of actual people if we can think of 
them as objects of the Divine Love. Enthu- 
siasm for brotherhood which does not in some 
way connect itself with the idea of the divine 
Fatherhood is apt to lack staying qualities. 
The social workers who cut themselves away 
from Christian teaching as to the divine 
Fatherhood find sooner or later that they have 
cut themselves away from a center of power. 
Social movements which aim at bringing in 
the universal brotherhood are apt in the end 
to create, or at least to reenforce, the idea of 
God as Father. 

The Christian doctrine of men as members 

227 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

of a vast family gives too a correction of some 
doctrines of human equality which are sadly 
needed. The mere theorist is apt to come for- 
ward with some statement of the doctrine of 
equality which makes all men alike equal in 
all things ; and such statements, wide of reality 
in themselves, lead to a practical result which 
is wide of reality. In the Christian thought 
all men are equal in the sense that all are born 
into the divine family. All are equal in the 
sense that all are alike the objects of the Divine 
Love. But all are not equal in the sense that 
all have equal ability. Anyone who sees what 
Christianity aims at will do all he can to re- 
lieve men of the artificial inequalities in which 
the present order abounds ; but some inequali- 
ties are deep-seated. Much of the talk about 
equality rests on the fancy that human char- 
acteristics are commensurable, as if there were 
any way of showing that the ability of the 
butcher is equal to that of the baker, or that of 
the general equal to that of the inventor, or 
that of the painter equal to that of the novelist. 
Moreover, though all are children of the divine 
Father, all are not equally responsive to the 
Father's love. All of which would seem to be 
self-evident, but much of which lacks recogni- 
tion by social theorists. On the whole, how- 

228 



THE DEMAND FOE CHRIST 

ever, there is increasing demand for the Chris- 
tian conception as best fitted to the facts of 
society. 

There is growing demand also for the Chris- 
tian method in social reform. That method is 
one of radicalism, but not the radicalism of the 
ax. In one of his parables Jesus tells of the 
tree cumbering the ground. A radical with an 
ax proposed to cut the tree down, but another 
radical with a spade proposed to dig about the 
roots and give them a chance. Radicalism 
deals with roots. The man who waters roots 
may be as truly a radical as the man who grubs 
up roots. Some social institutions have not yet 
had a chance. They are good enough in them- 
selves, but their roots lack water. Much bitter 
attack on industrial, political, ecclesiastical, 
educational, and other institutions is the radi- 
calism of the ax, while what is needed is the 
radicalism of the spade. And this in the end 
comes down to the improvement of the persons 
who make up the social body. As an extreme 
illustration take the furious attacks on mar- 
riage and the family to which extreme radicals 
continually give utterance. Improvements in 
marriage are improvements in the relations of 
married persons, and this in turn means im- 
provements in the persons themselves. Per- 

229 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

sons marry from wrong motive, or in ignorance 
of the character of the future partner, or with 
no adequate sense of the responsibilities in- 
volved in the marriage relation. Much in- 
justice results and many innocent suffer. 
Marriage laws no doubt need improvement, 
but the fundamental need is an improvement 
of persons. So with many other institutions. 
As the readers of an earlier chapter will recall, 
we hold no brief for industrial institutions, 
but even in our campaigns against institutions 
most open to question we must remember that 
we must in the end reach persons. We must 
so deal with institutions as to reduce tempta- 
tion to evil-doing to the minimum. Some in- 
stitutions to-day put before men temptations 
which only the strongest wills can withstand. 
The institutions must, therefore, be modified 
or abolished. But the final welfare of society 
cannot depend on abolishing institutions. 
Men must be brought to the place where they 
are above using a social institution for mere 
personal profit, and other men must develop 
the power to withstand the temptations inevi- 
table in any system. For illustration, think 
of the precaution taken to-day to guard the 
ballot. Not so very long ago election frauds 
by wholesale were possible. It was easy to put 

230 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

a ballot in a man-s hand and see that he put 
the vote in the box. It was easy to vote a man 
more than once. The Australian system did 
away with the first possibility, and thus re- 
duced the chances of election bribery. Regis- 
tration systems have practically done away 
with the second possibility. But do the Aus- 
tralian ballot and registration make democ- 
racy safe? The only safety is in the character 
of the man inside the voting booth. Democ- 
racy depends for its virtue on the goodness of 
good men. If the example of Christ means 
anything, it means that the radical method of 
social reform is the deep spiritual appeal 
which touches men in the depths. Christ re- 
fused to appeal to men by turning stones into 
bread. That was not radical enough. He re- 
fused to astonish them into submission by 
marvels. That was not radical enough. He 
refused to make political alliances. They were 
not radical enough. He chose, rather, to strike 
to the invisible center with an appeal for love 
of God and man which sweeps all the life into 
its current. 

We have seen that the great word in current 
ethical life is obligation. The teaching of 
Christ aids the ethical life not so much by 
giving a new set of duties as by giving new 

231 



THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 

force to the ideas which condition ethical de- 
velopment. Christianity does not advance new 
ethical notions. It is possible to find the 
ethical precepts of Christ in the Old Testa- 
ment, or even in non-Christian systems. The 
difference is in the religious ideas which place 
a sky over the earth which the ethical teachers 
give us. We have seen that the ethical em- 
phasis to-day has a mighty influence on the 
shaping of religious ideas. The religious ideas 
in turn repay the debt by giving new force to 
the moral ideas. There are some persons who 
declare that they can do the right for the 
right's own sake without any thought of re- 
ligious presuppositions, and these persons are 
at times inclined to sneer at those who demand 
religious presuppositions. Kant's thought of 
God, freedom, and immortality as implications 
of the moral nature does not seem to some who 
profess to worship right for right's own sake 
to be especially worthy. But those who feel 
the need of the implications feel that need not 
because of any less loyalty to right for right's 
sake. They think so much of the right that 
they are not willing that the universe should 
be such a universe as to make morality only 
the affair of fleeting mortals. Man must be 
free so as to be capable of real morality. Im- 

232 



I 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

mortality must give scope for morality. At the 
center must be a God who is himself bound by 
the demands of the moral law. Right for 
right's own sake may become rather empty 
unless we are in a universe where we can say 
at least something of man for man's own sake 
and worship God for God's own sake. Upon 
our doctrine of man and God our ethics will 
in the end depend for its force. 

The ethical demand for Christ, therefore, is 
the demand for a moral dynamic. That 
dynamic is found in the doctrine of man and 
the doctrine of God. On Christ's teaching that 
the deep human claims have the right of way 
we need not dwell. It is sufficient to say that 
in his view the deep and base sins are sins 
against the ideal of humanity. Even an insti- 
tution which his contemporaries regarded as 
transcendently sacred had to meet his declara- 
tion that the Sabbath was made for man and 
not man for the Sabbath. Even more force- 
ful, however, has, been the demand for Christ 
because of the Christian doctrine of God. The 
struggle for moral life in this world is so in- 
tense, the inducements to quit the struggle are 
so many, the sense of failure is at times so 
overwhelming that the soul cries out asking 
whether there is a moral God or not, and if 

233 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

there is, can we think of him as interested in 
our battle? The moral battlefield is a grim 
place. Where is God and what is he doing? 
Is he contemplating the scene from afar or is 
he at hand? Is he the God of the scientist 
merely, most interested in the law of gravita- 
tion, or is he interested in moral law? The 
answer of Jesus is clear. God is at hand. He 
is more truly in the moral struggle than we 
can be ourselves. Our success or failure means 
more to him than to us. Obligations are more 
truly binding upon him than on us. When we 
enter the really moral life we come close to 
him, and the more moral we become the more 
we become like him. The pure in heart see 
God. The seeker after morality seeks the real 
kingdom. He lives among the real persons. 
He attains to the real life. No matter what 
the appearance may be, the real universe is 
moral. Moral law is constitutional. When a 
man sets his will to do right, the stars and the 
God who made the stars are fighting for him. 

There is another factor in the power which 
Christ contributes to men engaged in the 
struggle for moral life. We have spoken of 
the sense of failure which attends the moral 
struggle. We arise in the morning and think 
that we shall reach our moral ideal by sunset, 

234 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

but at sunset the ideal mocks us from the dis- 
tance. Conscience lays upon us tasks which 
we feel we can never discharge. In addition 
to this we have lapses which burden us with a 
consciousness of personal guilt. We cry out 
for forgiveness and for a second chance, and 
for a third, and so on indefinitely. Here the 
Christian revelation comes in again to help us. 
The cross of Christ sets on high a holiness and 
love which reestablish and reenf orce us. In the 
name of a holiness w^hich we can never reach, 
but which we would reach if we could, we seek 
for forgiveness ; and in the name of a love for 
which we can find no adequate expression we 
go forth again to the battle. We grieve over 
our blunders, but rest in the consolation that 
the God of moral love, after all, takes our in- 
tention for the deed. So if we fall, w^e rise 
again. We are poor travelers, but we get 
ahead. Now, the present writer is not espe- 
cially concerned as to the theological terms in 
which the Holy love of God as set forth in the 
cross of Christ is stated, but we must not lose 
sight of the significance of the fact itself as a 
center of moral power. Right for right's own 
sake, with no thought of aid from religious con- 
ceptions, may suffice in ordinary and comfort- 
able circumstances, but is apt to lack power 

235 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

when deadly temptation appears. And when 
we are dealing with the man who is down, the 
bare contemplation of moral precepts, no mat- 
ter how correct these may be, is hardly enough 
to get him again upon his feet. 

We have said before that the great word in 
all our thought of man's mastery of the forces 
of the universe is the word "control.'^ Now 
control is not a making over of a force or a 
turning it back upon itself. Control recog- 
nizes the force and then seeks to utilize 
it. Control is the rudder of the ship. The 
emphasis upon control would seem to be 
an essentially Christian conception. Chris- 
tianity looks upon the vast forces as in a sense 
sacred — sacred, at least, as presenting a divine 
opportunity. Forces in ourselves are sacred 
in the sense that they can be given a divine 
direction. We are not to try to make our- 
selves something other than we are, or to turn 
our streaming forces back upon themselves. 
We are to accept ourselves as what we are and 
then to direct our lives aright. So with the 
social and all other forces. Rudders are to be 
put into them. They are not to be condemned 
and halted. They are not to be allowed to 
drift. They are to be steered to a goal. 

The truth of the Christian system as aiming 

236 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

at control in this sense is being more and more 
recognized, and is creating renewed demand 
for Christianity. There have been Christians 
who have declared that all the forces in this 
world, both inside ourselves and outside, are 
to be resisted as of the devil. The aim of these 
disciples has usually been good, but their 
method has not always been wise. Worldliness 
is of the inner spirit. The man who has least of 
worldly power may be most worldly in spirit, 
and the man who has most of worldly power 
may be unworldly in aim. Other Christians 
have declared that this world and its forces 
are to be allowed to drift whither they will, 
that they have little meaning for the kingdom 
of God. The true Christian conception would 
seem to be that the forces are to be neither 
resisted nor allowed to drift, but to be con- 
trolled. Hence the feeling both inside the 
Church and outside is that we must look to 
the teaching of Jesus for an understanding of 
the forces and to his spirit for a power which 
will control the forces. 

We do not mean that there is any demand 
to-day for a slavish imitation of Christ. Per- 
haps we would do better not to use the word 
^^imitation'^ at all. There is demand for ap- 
propriation of the teaching and spirit of 

237 



THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

Christ. But appropriation means not me- 
chanical imitation, but absorption and assimi- 
lation. The way of advance lies not through 
attempt to make a detailed code of ethics of 
the teaching of Jesus valid for all times, but 
through working Christ's thought of God and 
of man and of life into the life of to-day. And 
the spirit of Christ, while it cannot be de- 
scribed, is readily discernible. With that spirit 
we can contrive to get along with imperfectly 
working institutions or forces; and without 
that spirit we are helpless, no matter how 
worthy the institution or force in itself. In 
our relation to the great natural forces our 
question is as to who is running the machines 
and with what spirit. The answer of Chris- 
tianity is that God is the center and source of 
the forces, and that he is using them with the 
spirit that is revealed in Christ. In regard 
to all forces which can be brought under hu- 
man control, the function of Christianity is to 
animate these forces with the spirit of Christ. 

One of the most remarkable phenomena in 
history is the fact of what might be called the 
repeated return of Christ. After all attempts 
to explain him away, Christ returns to the 
thinking of men, and returns more powerful 
than before. We say that this is because of 

238 



THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 

his ability to minister to the deeper needs of 
men. Those needs become urgent and clam- 
orous and make demands upon thought sys- 
tems which only the teachings of Christ can 
satisfy and demands upon heart and will- 
forces which only the spirit of Christ can meet. 
It is part of the glory of our time that the 
Church of to-day is making everything turn 
around the thought and spirit of Christ. In 
her thought of the Scriptures, and of religious 
experience, and in her thought of herself as an 
instrument, the question which the Church 
raises is as to how to beget in men the spirit of 
Christ. Raising the question does not answer 
it, of course, but the future of the Church is 
never brighter than in the days when she 
clearly discerns the demand of the individual 
and of society for the spirit which is in Christ. 



239 



DEC 24 1912 



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